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THE RELIGION OF A PERSON. 



The Religion of a Person 



By 
JAMES ELLINGTON McGEE, Ph. D., 

Author of "Jesus: The World Teacher." 



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CINCINNATI: JENNINGS AND GRAHAM 
NEW YORK: EATON AND MAINS 






Copyright, 1912, 
By Jennings and Graham 



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To my sympathetic friend, my helpful 

counselor, my leal-hearted 

wife, 



CONTENTS 

Chapteb 

Foreword, 9 

I. The Kingdom, .... 13 

II. Reason, ...... 43 

III. Righteousness, . . . . 79 

IV. Freedom, 123 

V. Humility, 153 

VI. Faith, 189 

VII. Work, 219 

VIII. Prayer, ..... 251 

IX. Love, 297 

X. Epilogue, 341 



FOEEWORD. 

Thomas Cablyle in Ms * * Sartor Resartus" 
avows that the best effect of any book is to 
excite us to self-activity, to open for ns new 
mine shafts wherein we may dig to new 
depths. 

This book does not essay the task of say- 
ing the initial or final word on the subject 
chosen. Its purpose will be wholly accom- 
plished if it excites the reader to a self- 
activity, to a digging for himself in depths 
perhaps not new, but to some extent unex- 
plored. 



Chapter I. 
THE KINGDOM. 



Man's use and function is to be the witness of the 
glory of God and to advance that glory by his reason- 
able obedience and resultant happiness. 

Whatever enables us to fulfill this function is in 
the pure and first sense of the word useful to us; pre- 
eminently, therefore, whatever sets the glory of God 
more brightly before us. 

But things that only help us to exist are in a sec- 
ondary and mean sense useful, or rather if they be 
looked for alone they are useless and worse; for it 
would be better that we should not exist than that we 
should guiltily disappoint the purposes of existence. 

—JOHN RUSKIN. 



THE KINGDOM. 
I. 

No THOUGHT is worthy of a title tliat is 
not translatable into experience, knd no ex- 
perience is worthy of a title that is not trans- 
latable into thought. 

Life is a unit and admits of no permanent 
detachment. The fruit is the seed in perfec- 
tion. The seed is the fruit in embryo. The 
man is the boy in fulfillment. The boy is the 
man in prophecy. 

All life is a germ. All life is an expansion. 

The raw material of possible poems, pos- 
sible philosophies, possible histories inheres 
in the Hindoo outcast, the Chinese coolie, the 
African serf as really as in the English col- 
legian, the American graduate. Nothing is 
wanting but a little shuJBfling, a little sorting, 
somewhat of ligature, of cartilage, which we 
term time, opportunity, training mental and 

13 



14 The Religion of a Person. 

moral. Our chief crime against God and His 
world is our lapse into the beggarly habit, 
our plea of intellectual and spiritual mendi- 
cancy. 

Upon our awakening to the possibilities 
of personality, regardless of clime, color, and 
condition, we affirm oui: wealth. Life then 
becomes a vast, a sacred, a universal aim. 

The Kingdom of God is a personal king- 
dom. It is the Word made flesh. It is an 
organic protest against all forms of the im- 
personal. Chinese walls of exclusiveness are 
figments in the sphere of every-day living. 
Nimble Tartars, which we call economic, po- 
litical, industrial, scientific, religious thinkers 
and doers, scale these walls with agility im- 
mediately upon their erection. 

The ebb and flow of sea-tides know no 
distinction in shore lines. The earnest of the 
north wind, the whisperings of zephyrs, the 
rayings-f orth of the meridian sun are without 
regard for race or clime. In like fashion the 
principles which underlie all mental and 
moral experience and which make the articu- 
lation of that experience a perennial fact are 



The Kingdom. 15 

tHe property in fee simple of no single people 
upon the face of the globe. 

The hitherto backward peoples, Malay- 
sians, Japanese, Hindoos, Chinese, Filipinos, 
South Sea Islanders are proving themselves 
in these recent days to be capable of high de- 
velopment in the sciences of government, of 
economy, of education, of religion. The day 
has deceased in which we particularize the 
earth as partitions hopelessly sterile, as par- 
titions incalculably fecund. All men every- 
whither are through mental and spiritual de- 
velopment becoming majestic expressions of 
the universal mind, of the universal heart. 

The Kingdom of God finds within the 
compass and expression of the moral and 
spiritual life of men its final and true war- 
rant, but a completed order of thought and 
action relates our moral and spiritual life 
to every conceivable element of being. In 
affirming the world to be a personal world, 
all sane life, whether minute or massive, 
whether high or low, whether material or 
moral, has its distinctive and its universal 
function. God as the Creator and Conserver 



16 The Religion of a Person. 

of universal being, takes into account the 
hairs of our head, the sparrows of the air, 
the grasses of the field as truly as He con- 
siders the strength of the hills, the stars of 
the heavens, the waters of the great deep, the 
fashioning and preserving of animal and 
human life. He is the World Ground. And 
as the World Ground He is infinitely more 
than Schopenhauer's **Pure Will without In- 
tellect," Hartmann's ^^Unconscious Intelli- 
gence,'' Herbert Spencer's *^ Unknowable, '* 
Cudworth's *^ Plastic Force," Plato's '^Idea 
of the Good. ' ' He is the Infinite Personality 
evermore expressing Himself in thought, in 
will, in emotion. 

The world thus founded and thus con- 
served has for us a meaning that is total. 
Mr. Emerson commands the assent of com- 
plete thinking in the sentence, ' ' The index of 
mental proficiency is the perception of sim- 
plicity in the midst of variety." This per- 
ception is impossible if the world is essen- 
tially chaotic rather than cosmic. 

The early Greeks found themselves de- 
ceived by the strange faces that life put on. 



The Kingdom. 17 

in the midst of ceaseless change they discov- 
ered no identity, in the midst of never-ceasing 
variety they saw no simplicity. Hence they 
paid their homage to Jupiter, to Ceres, to 
Minerva, to Apollo, to Phoebns, to Neptune ; 
they declared the primacy of air, of water, of 
fire, of earth, of number, of atoms, of reason. 
They gave precedence and power to partic- 
ulars. 

The like blunder is made by all polythe- 
istic religion, by all impersonal philosophies. 
Among the present-day puerilities of the 
thought-world, of the practical world, are the 
assignment of fruitful fields to the creative 
genius of Ceres, of rolling and peaceful seas 
to the outstretched trident of Neptune, of the 
wisdom of Xenophanes, of Cicero, to the flash- 
ings forth of Minerva. And among the puer- 
ilities of the thought-world, of the practical 
world, are we now reckoning the sense phi- 
losophy of John Locke, the magic-working 
evolutionism of Herbert Spencer, the imper- 
sonal doctrines of Schopenhauer, of Hegel, of 
Hartmann, and all partial expressions of 
their philosophy. 



18 The Religion of a Person. 

On the impersonal plane of thought all 
the principles of thought either vanish or can- 
cel themselves. They do not remain long 
enough for impersonal thought to fixate 
them ; that is, give to them an owner ; or their 
rapid appearance and disappearance leaves 
nothing but a final blank. 

It is the thinking, conscious, determining 
self which arrests the immanent principles 
of the thought-life and properly names and 
gives them value. It is the thinking, con- 
scious, determining self which gives to the 
categories of thought a place in the practical 
world. It is in personality alone that change 
and identity find reconciliation. 

In impersonalism they are mutually ex- 
clusive. The meaning of a personal philos- 
ophy is of infinite import for the individual 
and for society. Infinitely interpreted, God 
is the Personality, and beside Him there is 
no other. Finitely interpreted, man is the 
supreme thinker and doer, finding his abiding 
efficiency in and through God. No adequate 
premises for life's great conclusions are dis- 



The Kingdom. 19 

coverable save in the doctrine of a personal 
world. A true word is that of Lord Bacon in 
his ** Novum Organum," ^^Syllogistic reason- 
ing is utterly inadequate to the subtlety of 
nature. ' ^ 

In other words, life is too great for mere 
reason, or mere will, or mere feeling, or mere 
force of any kind whatsoever. It is only ex- 
plicable in terms of spirit, and spirit em- 
braces all thought, all feeling, all will mani- 
foldly expressed. 

The Kingdom of God thus becomes God 
manifest in Himself; God manifest in and 
through man. His image. His likeness. We 
can not assign a firstness to any material 
setting-forth of life. ^^It is the absence of 
anything like a material foundation," ob- 
serves Sir Oliver Lodge, ^^ which makes the 
earth so secure. If it were based upon a 
pedestal or otherwise solidly supported, we 
should be anxious as to the stability or dur- 
ableness of the support, and we should have 
a royal commission sitting on if It is upon 
the primary fact of personality that we con- 



20 The Religion of a Person. 

sciously and unconsciously rest secure while 
whirling a thousand miles or more per hour 
through liquid space. 

As a personal kingdom the Kingdom of 
God is identical with the organized life of 
the Christian faith. In Jesus Christ, and in 
Him alone, the true and abiding interpreta- 
tion of God and God's world is found. This 
Kingdom organically expressing Jesus 
Christ, embraces all legitimate thought and 
all legitimate action. It transcends the 
boundary lines of the visible Christian 
Church. It includes the Church in its sane- 
ness of thinking and living, but it includes 
also all sane expressions of life that are out- 
side the pale of the visible Church. The or- 
ganized life of the Christian faith affirms it- 
self perennially. The organized life of the 
visible Church has periodically removed it- 
self from many spheres of thought and ac- 
tion. The priesthood of the mediaeval period 
was antagonistic toward scientific and po- 
litical inquiry and progress. The celibacy of 
the papal Church is a standing opposition to 
the basic relation of human society, the mari- 



The Kingdom. 21 

tal relation. Adherence to creed has been a 
slogan of the Roman Catholic and of the 
Protestant Churches, rather than adherence 
to character, with all too painful recurrence. 
Men of unimpeachable personality have 
found themselves excommunicated by papal 
or Protestant judgment at different periods 
of the history of the visible Church. Lines 
of demarcation between things secular and 
things sacred have been made by the Church 
with some frequency. Religion one thing, 
politics another ; faith in God one thing, faith 
in man another; prayer one thing, work con- 
scientiously and intelligently done another, 
have been long-cherished antitheses in the 
minds of many accepted leaders of the vari- 
ous denominations of the Church of God. 
These per^/ersions of truth find no congenial 
place in the Kingdom of God, in the organ- 
ized life of the Christian faith. "Wherever 
truth is to be found, whether in gravity, in 
cohesion, in business, in government, in phys- 
ical repulsion, in art, in science — there the 
Kingdom of God is to be found, there the or- 
ganic life of the Christian faith is to be 



22 The Religion of a Person. 

found. The so-called warfare between re- 
ligion and science is the vapid breathing of 
ignorance. God's world is a personal world. 
In Him all things, all men live, move, and 
have their being. No soundness is possible, 
whether in thought or in performance, ex- 
clusive of God. 

Malformation, malfeasance, are the sole 
denials of the Divine presence and power. 
All things else declare the glory of God. A 
modern thinker remarks, ^^Who can fail to 
see that steadily and with fast-growing mo- 
mentum the scientific interpretation of the 
universe turns in the direction of Christian- 
ity? It was an incipient insanity which ar- 
raigned Galileo, which burned Savonarola, 
which persecuted Martin Luther, which drove 
Eoger Williams from the Massachusetts 
Colony, which imprisoned the Puritans." It 
is an incipient insanity to-day which empha- 
sizes the letter rather than the spirit of the 
Christian life. 

It is but ordinary wisdom for all men to 
keep in mind the word of Paul, *^The letter 
killeth, but the spirit giveth life;" **The 



The Kingdom. 23 

Kingdom of God is not in word, but in 
power. ' ' 

Eeligion degenerates into cant when it at- 
taches itself to the impersonal. It performs 
its office among men when it emphasizes per- 
petually the possibility of personality. This 
was Jesus ' message to the world. This mes- 
sage He incarnated. All aspiring and achiev- 
ing civilizations of the modern world are the 
fruit of His incarnation. He established be- 
tween Himself and all poets, all philosophers, 
all orators, all educators, all scientists, all 
statesmen, bonds of closest intimacy. He ap- 
preciated birds, flowers, pearls, beasts, wa- 
ters, grasses, government, logic, ethics, meta- 
physics, glowing suns, heaving seas, men, 
women, children of all degree and place. He 
is pre-eminently the world's mental and spir- 
itual exuberance. Nothing of detachment, 
nothing of the materialistic, nothing of the 
impersonal circumscribed His nature. He 
was the fullness of the Godhead bodily. The 
rhythm and music, the beauty and benevo- 
lence of God He rendered into phrases inter- 
pretable by all men. The heights and depths 



24 The Religion of a Person. 

of His thought expressed in pictures and in 
postulates have enriched the minds of men 
incomparably in the days agone, and are to- 
day passing ^'like bullion in the currency of 
all nations." 

Jesus Christ fundamentally suffices for 
the tuition of the race. Science finds in Him 
inspiration; likewise government, art, edu- 
cation, industry, religion. He is the germ 
of all truth. He is the perfected fruitage of 
all truth. 

He who communes with life in and 
through Jesus Christ, regardless of His ac- 
tivity, is more than bodily present at Olym- 
pian feasts. For him life becomes an ecstasy, 
a joyous acquaintance, a broad human senti- 
ment, an infinite possibility. It is not con- 
ceivable that life should be a mental and 
moral waste, a devotion to mediocrities, a 
pernicious indulgence to him who sustains 
any point of mental or moral tangency with 
the Son of God. 

**Go,'' said Emerson, **with mean peo- 
ple, and you think life is mean. " ^ ' Evil com- 
munications," said the Apostle Paul, *^cor- 



The Kingdom. 25 

rupt good manners." These principles are 
inviolable, as all experience asserts. Bnt the 
antithesis is equally true ; communicate with 
pure souls, and life becomes vital, delectable, 
spermatic. The Kingdom of God is the king- 
dom of personality in its final expression of 
love of truth, of goodness. Its ever-resound- 
ing word, its ever-present intent is the estab- 
lishment of all life, individual and social in 
the image and likeness of God, the All-Fair, 
the All-Efficient, the All-Knowing. 

n. 

We repeat: The Kingdom. of God is iden- 
tical with the organic expression of the Chris- 
tian faith, and the Christian faith is at one 
with all personal activity sanely and service- 
ably expressed. The world is God's world. 
He can be excluded from no phase of being 
that is a legitimate articulation, a legitimate 
embodiment. 

The message of Jesus to the world was a 
personal word. He did not inveigh against 
any sensible use of material forces. He did 
not condemn men because of their employ- 



26 The Religion of a Person. 

ments in the physical world. He did in- 
sist that life was a perversion, a falsism, a 
disaster if things became for us a finality. 
To the limited vision it requires somewhat 
of imaginative saliency, somewhat of the 
dithyrambic mood to perceive in the pell-mell 
of life known as trade, the sure in working 
and outworking of spiritual forces. And yet 
this spiritual efficiency in trade, in the 
world's commercial development, is palpable 
to the studious eye. Social science avers that 
when men began to barter with each other the 
assertions of mind and conscience were im- 
mediate and perennial. The free, the active, 
the conscious, the intelligent and ethical self 
became effective. Trade has been no small 
factor in the elimination of fictitious aristoc- 
racies, of slavery, of feudalism, and of divers 
forms of oppression. Physical power and 
prowess are ordered to the rear by the voice 
of commerce, of industry. Mental and moral 
forces assume the headship. The function of 
trade is the control of all material force. In 
poetic speech it is to command the wave-con- 
quering steeds of Neptune, the plenteous 



The Kingdom. 27 

hand of Ceres, the formidable fires of Jove, 
the genial beams of Phoebus in behalf of 
hmnan fortune and felicity. 

In practical speech it is to subject all mat- 
ter, all force, all motion within the limita- 
tions of space and time to the necessities of 
thought, of will, of emotion. 

In prophetic speech it is the fulfillment 
of the word : * ^ Thou madest man to have do- 
minion over the works of Thy hands: Thou 
hast put all things under his feet." 

It is the free man wisely directing his 
powers who gives beginning to trade and 
who perpetuates it. All repression of per- 
sonal freedom, all degenerate uses of per- 
sonal power have as their consequent the re- 
pression of all profitable commercial life. 
Greek helots, Roman thralls, mediseval serfs, 
African slaves, devotees of Asiatic heathen- 
ism, Americans or Europeans who make of 
wickedness a method, can make no claim as 
helpers in the up-rearing of the commercial 
commonwealth. 

The Kingdom of God as righteousness in 
the Holy Spirit, as the voice and efficiency of 



28 The Religion of a Person. 

personality, as the organic expression of the 
doctrines of Jesus, is thus inclusive of all real 
and abiding trade relations among men. 

The word of prophet and apostle clearly 
indicates this inclusion: **A false balance is 
abomination to the Lord: but a just weight 
is His delight;" *^Eiches profit not in the 
day of wrath; but righteousness delivereth 
from death;" *^A man shall not be estab- 
lished by wickedness;" '*He that tilleth his 
land shall be satisfied with bread; but he 
that folio we th vain persons is void of under- 
standing;" ** Wealth gotten by vanity shall 
be diminished: but he that gathereth by la- 
bor shall increase;" ** Bread of deceit is 
sweet to a man; but afterwards his mouth 
shall be filled with gravel;" ** Divers weights 
are an abomination unto the Lord; and a 
false balance is not good;" ^* Provide things 
honest in the sight of all men;" **Ye shall 
not steal, neither deal falsely, neither lie one 
to another ; thou shalt not defraud thy neigh- 
bor, neither rob him;" ** Lying lips are abom- 
ination to the Lord; but they that deal truly 
are His delight" 



The Kingdom. 29 

Graphic examples of tlie inclusiveness of 
all legitimate trade in the Kingdom of God 
are afforded by such men as Isaac Eich, the 
Boston millionaire, whose wealth founded 
Boston University; George Peabody, the 
banker-philanthropist, whose benefactions 
bless two continents ; Amos Lawrence, one of 
America's industrial princes, whose business 
success was a ceaseless contribution to the 
promotion of righteous dealing everywhere. 
And nothing of abiding commercial achieve- 
ment is possible divorced from ** whatsoever 
things are true, whatsoever things are hon- 
est, whatsoever things are just. 



>> 



in. 

What is affirmable of trade is likewise af- 
firmable of government, of education, of art, 
of science, and all other legitimate phenom- 
ena of thought and experience. 

That governmental principle and prac- 
tice whose end is the weal of humankind, im- 
mediately affirms and makes real the King- 
dom of God, immediately affirms and makes 
real Jesus Christ among men. William the 



30 The Religion of a Person. 

Silent, Prince of Orange, in the founding of 
the Dutch Eepublic in 1576 made perma- 
nent religious liberty throughout Northern 
Europe. Oliver Cromwell in his resistance 
of the cruelties and corruptions of the Eng- 
lish monarchy secured for all English-speak- 
ing people for all time to come civil and re- 
ligious freedom. The American Declaration 
of Independence, July 4, 1776, was the birth 
of a nation whose prime mission among the 
peoples of the earth is the inauguration of 
liberty, justice, fraternity in the name of 
Jesus Christ. These political movements 
were inspired by the Spirit of the Living 
God. 

And to-day, whether in the French As- 
sembly, the Japanese Diet, the British Par- 
liament, the American Congress, the enact- 
ment of righteous legislation is the organic 
expression of the Christian faith. It is the 
voice of God uttered through human agency. 

And all rulers, whether kings, presidents, 
governors, mayors, who **rule in judgment" 
and keep ever in mind the word of IsraePs 
seer, ^^He that ruleth over men must be just. 



The Kingdom. 31 

ruling in the fear of God, ' ' are indeed work- 
ers together with God in all the intent and 
extent of His Kingdom. 

It is indeed an indubitable instance of 
mental and moral myopy that would deny to 
Edmund Burke, to "William E. Gladstone, to 
John Marshall, to George Washington, to 
Prince Bismarck a large place in the estab- 
lishment of universal righteousness. 

That art which interprets life from the 
angle of vision of Michael Angelo with his 
** Moses" in stone, his ** Creation" and ^^Last 
Judgment" in color, fearful through the 
years lest his mallet, his chisel, his brush 
catch the taint of avarice; or from the angle 
of vision of Beethoven, of Haydn, of Handel, 
of Titian — is the Kingdom of God in rhythm 
of color, in rhythm of contour, in rhythm of 
sound. The genius of these great souls was 
controlled by their heart. They lived in the 
realm of the radiant, the beautiful, the bound- 
less, the musical. Dreamers of dreams they 
were, seers of visions. And upon them in 
deed and in truth was poured out the spirit of 
prophecy. And what is true of these master 



32 The Religion of a Person. 

souls, these visualizers of beantiful and har- 
monious dreams may be affirmed of all souls 
who see in all life God latent, God patent. 
Eeason blends with rhythm in the lines 
of Gilbert Parker: 

"Art's use: What is it but to touch the springs 
Of nature? But to hold a torch up for 
Humanity in life's large corridor. 

To guide the feet of peasants and of kings ! 

What is it but to carry union through 

Thoughts alien to thoughts kindred, and to 

merge 
The lines of color that should not diverge. 

And give the sun a window to shine through! 

What is it but to make the world have heed 
For what its dull eyes would hardly scan; 

To draw in a stark light a shameless deed. 
And show the fashion of a kingly man! 

To cherish honor and to smite all shame. 
To lend heart's voices and give all thoughts 
name!" 



The Kingdom. 33 

lY. 

No science that is worthy of the name an- 
nounces the self-sufficiency of things or of 
laws. The much-vaunted antagonism be- 
tween science and religion is worthy of a 
place in a jester's thought, but not elsewhere. 
Science is not science which finds finality in 
physical stuff or in physical energy. 

Eeligion is not religion which denies to 
God an ever-present efficiency in things and 
in thoughts. The supernatural which denies 
the natural is as great a fiction as the nat- 
ural which denies the supernatural. Science 
is but a descriptive order of how personality 
infinite and finite avows itself. The scien- 
tific school represented by Haeckel, Huxley, 
Spencer, that would see in personality the 
mere effervescence of matter, that would see 
in the fungus, in the sap of the tree, in the 
cloud-bank the potential genius which gave 
to the world the American Constitution, Par- 
adise Lost, the submarine cable, the printing 
press, is hardly more than **an agreed-upon 
fable.'' 

The only reputable scientific interpreta- 
3 



34 The Religion of a Person. 

tion of forces material, mental, moral, is the 
interpretation whicli finds its incipiency, its 
perpetuity, and its ultimate in personality. 
The personal world is but another phrasing 
of the Kingdom of God, another phrasing of 
the organic life of the Christian faith. 

The science which finds utterance and 
concretion in Sir Isaac Newton, in William 
Kepler, in Hugh Miller, in Samuel F. B. 
Morse, in James Watt, in Eichard Ark- 
wright, in Asa Gray, in Louis Agassiz, in 
Alexander Graham Bell, in Lord Kelvin, and 
in souls of similar character, is essentially 
and practically Christian. It finds its root- 
age and its fruit in personality. It is the 
product of spiritually conscious and deter- 
mining life, and it reacts upon that life in 
nourishment and in power. 

V. 

The personal kingdom is inclusive of all 
sane and serviceable culture. The education 
which neglects any aspect of body, of mind, 
of heart, is a perversion. Life is a unit. 
Hercules and his twelve labors, Achilles and 



The Kingdom. 35 

his mighty thews, Lysander with his con- 
scienceless cunning, the fanaticism of Peter 
the Hermit, are utter degradations of the 
term culture of the educational concep- 
tion. All properties of our nature demand 
a full-circled development. We neglect our 
bodies at our peril. Likewise our minds and 
hearts. The superlatively high appraisement 
given to the human body by the word of in- 
spiration, ''temple of the Holy Ghost," 
** temple of God,'' utterly forbids the self- 
imposed flagellations of the Roman Catholic 
monkery and the gormandizing of ancient 
and modem Epicures. The body is worthy 
of our solicitude and our nurture as the serv- 
ant of our mental and moral nature. It is 
not at any time to be regarded as our enemy, 
nor is it to be assigned the place of master- 
ship. 

Our mental powers find their abiding 
worth and eifectualness as servants of our 
moral nature. True culture evermore af- 
firms this fact. Intellectual geniuses of the 
order of Cardinal Eichelieu, of Jean Jacques 
Rousseau, of Aaron Burr, of Edgar Allan 



36 The Religion of a Person. 

Poe, of Lord Byron, of Napoleon the First 
in their degeneration of moral character 
made of themselves mere ** cunning casts in 
clay," ** reeling fauns,'' ^^ rubbish cast to the 
void," *^magTietic mockeries." Life as a 
unit, embracing all efficiency of body, mind, 
and spirit, is the breathing of an ampler day 
for ever nobler ends; it is '*high nature," in 
Tennyson's phrase, ^^ amorous of the good." 
The conclusion of all history is that abid- 
ing influence, abiding performances can not 
be divorced from the moral and spiritual 
character of the man. Eichelieu, Eousseau, 
Burr, Poe, Byron, Napoleon impressed their 
immediate day as men of consummate genius, 
but the decades and centuries succeeding 
gave to them another rank. Our estimate 
to-day of Eichelieu, Burr, Napoleon and their 
coadjutors is the estimate which we accord 
to keen-eyed, hungry foxes who know where 
the geese lodge. Our estimate of Poe, of 
Byron, and of their literary kind is that 
which we ascribe to sweet bells jangled, out 
of tune and harsh. The whole man alone 
abides. 



The Kingdom. 37 

The fullness of our nature alone influ- 
ences our fellows for all succeeding time. 
This is the word of the Kingdom of God. 
It is the word of all sane living. We can 
not subvert, despite our endeavor, the order 
of life. Detachments, divisions, partialities 
are contraventions of the divine plan. The 
whole man functionalizing himself all the 
time, everywhither, is God's will concerning 
us. A regard for this fundamental require- 
ment works our continual weal. A disregard 
works our ceaseless woe. 

VI. 

The Kingdom of God is the avowal that 
personality fully expressed gives to all 
thoughts and things their abiding form and 
force. It is the avowal that the visible world 
is man 's workshop ; that the intent and extent 
of our creation is the mastery of all econo- 
mies of being for the purposes of the spirit. 
The character of full-orbed personality must 
be expressed in art, in science, in politics, in 
literature, in commerce, in industry. Mu- 
tually destructive are stones, waters, fire, at- 



38 The Religion of a Person. 

traction, repulsion, individual and social 
aims separate from the activity of the com- 
plete man. Indeed, the normal expression 
of life is f onnd in the word and work of the 
Kingdom of God, in the organized thought 
and service of the Christian religion. The 
laws underlying all growth, all development, 
are in the last analysis the laws of the spirit. 
The principle of physicial gravity no less 
than the principle of spiritual gravity, the 
principle of cohesion no less than the law of 
conscience, conspire for the frustration of 
wrong-doing and for the furtherance of right- 
doing. In God all things and all men live, 
move, and have their being. 

Essays to defeat the plan and purpose 
of God win for us the appellation, fool. Ef- 
forts to co-operate with the plan and pur- 
pose of God win for us the enheartening 
word, ''Well done thou good and faithful 
servant ! ' ' 

Emerson, in his essay, ''Worship,'' has 
termed religion the "public nature." Anent 
this interpretation he writes, "The decline 
of the influence of Calvin or Penelon or 



The Kingdom, 39 

"Wesley or Channing need give us no un- 
easiness. The Builder of Heaven has not 
so ill constructed His creature as that the re- 
ligion — that is, the public nature — should fall 
out: the public and the private element, like 
north and south, like inside and outside, like 
centrifugal and centripetal, adhere to every 
soul and can not be subdued except the soul 
is dissipated. God builds His temple in the 
heart. The whole state of man is a state 
of culture, and the flowering and completion 
may be described as religion.'^ 



Chapter II. 
REASON. 



If a man of science seeks to dogmatize concern- 
ing the emotions and the will, and asserts that he can 
reduce them to atomic forces and motions, he is ex- 
hibiting the smallness of his conceptions, and gibbeting 
himself as a laughing stock to future generations. 

—SIR OLIVER LODGE. 

Scientific thought is compelled to accept the idea of 
creative power. Forty years ago I asked Liebig, as 
we walked through a woodland, if he believed that 
the grass and flowers which we saw around us grew 
by mere chemical forces^ He answered, "No, no more 
than I could believe that a book of botany describing 
them could grow by mere chemical forces." 

—LORD KELVIN. 

Theistic education is simply domestic education in 
its widest form. The idea of God is the enfolding 
atmosphere of thought and feeling; ... it is the 
undiscemed fountain of the progressive idealization 
of existence, the center from which all things are re- 
garded, and the light in which they are beheld. The 
consciousness of God thus goes with the normal youth 
as the day goes with him^ He lives in it, society has 
its being in it, the universe moves in it. 

—GEORGE A. GORDON. 



EEASON. 

I. 

The Kingdom of God is rational. It abounds 
in fundamental wisdom; it is good sense in 
theory and in fact. It does not find its being 
and support in pure arbitrariness nor in the 
ipse dixitism of any individual or body of 
individuals. The solipsistic word of saint 
or sage, of philosopher or priest, of class or 
community, does not establish nor overthrow 
it. It is at one with every law of life. It 
effects a union indissoluble between the law 
of conscience and the law of cohesion, be- 
tween the law of gravity and the law of 
goodness, between the law of conduct and the 
law of crystallization. 

The man who lives on the plane of the 
physical, with no regard for the plane of 
the spiritual, is irrational. The man who 
aspires to live on the plane of the spiritual, 

43 



44 The Religion of a Person. 

with no regard for the plane of the physical, 
is likewise irrational. 

The implicit and explicit life of the King- 
dom of God is not expressed in terms wholly 
suhjective and individual. Nor is it ex- 
pressed in terms wholly objective and social. 
It is experienced and affirmed by the entire 
agreement of the life within with the life 
without, by the individual and the -social 
finding in each their otherness, by the su- 
pernatural voicing the natural and the nat- 
ural revoicing the supernatural. The min- 
ister at the altar is not a man of reason, 
save as he gives an every-day validity to his 
sacred office. The man of statecraft is not 
rational if he fails to make of the city, the 
State, the Eepublic, divine habitations. The 
man of commerce is negligent of rational 
living in the event of his failure to convert 
his efficiencies into the highest achievements 
of love, truth, and goodness. The laws of 
matter and of mind become sane only as they 
prove their workable effectiveness. The 
laws of the spiritual life are not sane only as 
they prove their workable effectiveness. 



Reason. 45 

The Kingdom of God is the exponent of 
valid principles wherever found. To the 
man of physical appetite and passion it says, 
Observe with rigor and vigor every physio- 
logical, hygienic, and dietetic law. To the 
man of mental appetite and passion it says, 
Live in accord with laws logical and experi- 
mental, and do not flatter yourself that a 
stable mental structure may be built up other- 
wise. To the man of spiritual aspiration its 
injunction is. Observe the principles which 
pre-condition all truth, all beauty, all good- 
ness, else even spiritual aspiration will be- 
come *'the dead fly in life's compost of 
spices." Rational warrant is the dictum of 
the Kingdom of God, whether in spheres 
material, mental, or moral. 

n. 

It is the work of reason to distinguish 
between the consequential and the inconse- 
quential, between consistency and inconsist- 
ency. A Nemesis stands ever ready to chas- 
tise our every invasion of the proportionate 
and the proper. "We are moral dullards in 



46 The Religion of a Person. 

perceiving that no grammatical form, no 
specious argument, no traditional association 
can give plausibility to lawlessness. Rea- 
son inveighs against our doing battle with 
the laws that are fundamental to our inward 
worth and outward good. History abounds 
with clever essays to circumvent the regu- 
lative ideas and inspirational ideas of life. 
The Hebrew prophets spoke not only out of 
the sanctuary of the intuitions, but also out 
of the prof oundest experiences of daily liv- 
ing when they exclaimed, **The soul that sin- 
neth, it shall die;" ^* There is no peace, saith 
my God, to the wicked;" 'Hhough hand join 
in hand, the wicked shall not be unpunished ; ' ' 
*'as righteousness tendeth to life, so he that 
pursueth evil pursue th it to his own death ; ' ' 
*4n the way of righteousness is life and in 
the pathway thereof there is no death." 
Alexander the Great, with the major part of 
the world as his tributary province, was not 
sufficiently adroit to defeat the good sense 
of the universe. Tiberius Caesar, Caligula, 
Nero, Trajan, Domitian, Vespasian, wearers 
of the Roman purple, wielders of a political 



Reason. 47 

power never since paragoned in human his- 
tory, terminated their careers despite their 
stealth of nature, suffused with shame be- 
cause of their defiance of the immanent prin- 
ciples of all abiding fortune and felicity. 
Napoleon the First, with the physical thews 
of Anakim, and the mental cleverness of an 
Alcibiades, vainly sought to convert all Eu- 
rope into a French empire. Emerson, in his 
essay, ** Napoleon: or the Man of World," ob- 
serves that he was an experiment under the 
most favorable conditions of the powers of in- 
tellect without conscience. Napoleon seemed 
to find pleasure in offering affronts to the 
highest order of life. Dicta, such as these: 
** There are two levers for moving men, in- 
terest and fear;" *4ove is a silly infatua- 
tion, depend upon it;" '^friendship is but a 
name," were his final undoing. The good 
sense of the universe will not be mocked by 
a Napoleon, a Caligula, a Nero, a Trajan, 
a Domitian, a Eichelieu, a Talleyrand. The 
man has not been ushered into this sublunar 
world who can make merry with the conse- 
quential and consistent facts of life and pros- 



48 The Religion of a Person. 

per in soul. Great natures seek a perennial 
fellowship with all legitimate thought and 
experience. It was such an ambition pos- 
sessed by Epaminondas that moved Cicero 
to call him the greatest man that Greece 
ever produced. It was such an ambition that 
made Cincinnatus, the Roman patrician, the 
world's immortal exemplar of unselfish fealty 
to country. It was such an ambition that 
made of Gustavus Adolphus the invincible 
defender of the Protestant reform in the 
seventeenth century. This mighty man of 
ethical and spiritual valor counted not his 
life dear unto himself, that he might estab- 
lish and perpetuate the civil and religious 
liberties of the world. His dying words, ^'I 
seal with my blood the Protestant religion 
and the liberties of Germany," are moving 
challenges to heroic tempered souls of what- 
ever age or clime. In such challenges there 
resides always a melody like unto the music 
of deep-toned bells. " 'Tis the best use of 
a fate" (which is but another naming for 
the divine necessity) *Ho teach a fatal cour- 
age," observes a modern seer. The affini- 



Reason. 49 

ties that make for rational living, brook no 
oversight. Eather than the guilt of such an 
oversight an exceeding wisdom would be ours 
if in our little world of man we strove to 
out-scorn the to-and-fro conflicting wind and 
rain, and hurled defiance at oak-cleaving 
thunderbolts. There is, indeed, a mathemat- 
ical measurement to worth and to non-worth, 
to substance and to semblance that is as 
inviolable as the equation two raised to the 
fourth power equals sixteen. Benefit, not 
bane, is the end of life. Hence every in- 
fraction of love and equity demand penal 
satisfaction. All true appraisement of life 
is in the terms of the spirit. An eternal 
verity is that which is affirmed in apostolic 
speech : ^^ To be carnally minded is death ; but 
to be spiritually minded is life and peace;" 
*^he that soweth to his flesh shall of the 
flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to 
the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life ever- 
lasting." Firstness of soul is the word of 
all sane thinking. Life finds no primal war- 
rant in the realm of the material. The 
French encyclopedists, with a liquid elo- 
4 



50 The Religion of a Person. 

quence for which the French mind is justly 
famed, sought to rear a philosophic structure 
on the assumption, Man is a body and noth- 
ing more, governed by laws purely physical 
and necessary. According to their assump- 
tion, all conscious life was a compound of 
sensations. Therefore they declared: The 
sole motive of all human action is egoism 
and self-interest. Such a philosophy could 
not survive the shock of speculative inquiry 
nor could it withstand the testings of every- 
day experience. The priority of personal- 
ity is the ever-recurrent word of legitimate 
thinking and sensible living. Life in terms 
of sense experience has no abiding quality. 
It admits of no fixedness only as we posit 
the unchanging self. It admits of no inter- 
pretation only as we posit the thinking self. 
It admits of no efficiency only as we posit 
the dynamic self. The laws of attraction, 
repulsion, cohesion, crystallization find their 
application in the surface of being. They 
can not make for themselves one single inch 
of vantage ground in the substance of being. 
They do not inaugurate. They are inaugu- 



Reason. 51 

rated. They do not utilize. They are 
utilized. In themselves they are abstrac- 
tions. It is only as personality thinks and 
acts that physical forces come into being 
and establish their validity. French en- 
cyclopedism renounced the cause and center 
of being, and espoused the effect and the cir- 
cumference of being. And this philosophy 
became the rock on which the French nation 
split. 

III. 

Eeason avows the community and iden- 
tity of intelligence. "What is true for the 
individual must be true for the race. Knowl- 
edge is something more than a private pos- 
session. If what we know may not be known 
by others, then all speech is an impertinence, 
and all essays to make ourselves understood 
by others are the convulsive energies of a 
mind diseased. No labored argument, how- 
ever, is needed to convince ourselves that no 
fact is more patent than the community 
and identity of intelligence. Heraclitus, Py- 
thagoras, Euclid, Aristotle can not, if they 



52 The Religion of a Person. 

would, conceal their thought from the in- 
quiring mind in this year of grace. ^^He 
that is once admitted to the right of reason 
is made a free man of the whole estate. 
T\niat Plato has thought, he may think ; what 
a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any 
time has befallen any man, he can under- 
stand," writes Emerson in his essay, ^'His- 
tory." The discriminating mind can see the 
reproduction of Socrates in Plato, of Plato 
in Aristotle, of Homer in Virgil, of Pericles 
in Alexander Hamilton, of Paul in Augus- 
tine. Archimedes is alive to-day in the fash- 
ioner of a modem steamship, the architect 
of a suspension bridge, in the designer of 
the latest addition to the sky line of New 
York City. Arabic arithmeticians, Greek 
geometers, Latin poets, and Eoman priests 
walk abroad in this decade of Christendom 
and find eager auditories throughout all 
habitable parallels. Into our conscious do- 
main we incorporate with diurnal frequency 
all dramatists, all lyrists, all artists, all 
prophets, all grandees in the spheres of 
thought and action. No thing, no age, no 



Reason. 53 

oracle is alien to our nature. One soul, 
whether in the day dawn of the race, or in 
the present hour of meridian splendor, is 
the counterpoise of all souls as a capillary 
column of water is a balance for the sea. 
The youth who is just emerging from the 
period of non-reflection has the prerogative 
of treating all books and all genius with the 
hauteur of a universal sovereign. His in- 
tellectual integrity is as sacred as was that 
of Parmenides, of Anaxagoras, of the prophet 
Isaiah, of Ambrose, of Luther, of Wesley, 
or of "Washington. He has the right, na- 
tive and acquired, of demanding that all 
genius and character, both ancient and mod- 
em, render back to him his highest con- 
sciousness. If they fail in this pre-eminent 
work, the forfeiture of their power and 
prestige is apparent. Sophocles, ^schylus, 
Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe have not com- 
pleted their divinely appointed work in the 
education of centuries and decades of Eu- 
ropean life. They must also educate Amer- 
ica, Asia, and the islands of the sea. They 
must approve themselves as masters of in- 



54 The Religion of a Person. 

spiration and delight to me in this most 
recent day of grace. If this office is alien 
to their powers, then are they particular 
rather than universal men. God's world is 
a nnit. It is not a series of detachments, it 
is not a conglomerate heap, it is not what 
Carlyle wonld call ^'the outer hull of chaotic 
confusion.'' It is the community and iden- 
tity of intelligence that makes of the contact 
between Teuton and Slav, Anglo-Saxon and 
Malaysian, Chinese and African Kaffir, a 
mental and moral benefit. Life is not a close 
corporation. It is rather a joint stock com- 
pany in which the whole wide world, in 
spheres mental, spheres moral, spheres spir- 
itual, shares equally, whether of profit or of 
loss. 

God is no respecter of persons. He has 
not set the stamp of His especial favor upon 
either Jew, Greek, Eoman, Celt, American, or 
East Indian. But to all He has given access 
to the immensity of His nature. Private 
property is the invention of the fictionist, the 
delusion of the exclusionist, the device of the 
corruptionist. The divine word is, '*A11 



Reason. 55 

things are yours, and ye are Christ's, and 
Christ is God 's ; " ^' the living God giveth us 
all things richly to enjoy.'' 

As a dynamic factor in the Kingdom of 
God reason thus vindicates itself. No single 
precept nor practice of the Kingdom is of 
private interpretation; nor does it admit of 
exclusive possession. All responsive and obe- 
dient souls are holders in fee simple of all 
that God says and does. Jews, in announcing 
His Messiahship, used the descriptive title 
Son of man seventy-two times. This was the 
equivalent of the declaration: I am not the 
possession in particular of the seed of Abra- 
ham: but also to the Greek, Barbarian, 
Scythian, bond, free, I am the Friend that 
loveth at all times, the Brother bom for ad- 
versity, the Power of God, the Wisdom of 
God. The New Testament Scriptures, the 
complete verbal revelation of the Kingdom of 
God, approve themselves beyond all perad- 
venture as the world's manual of ethics and 
religion, not on grounds a priori, but on the 
ground of inductive efficiency. It is in this 
Book that all men see their possible deprava- 



56 The Religion of a Person. 

tions and their possible exaltations. It is in 
this Book that all men find the highest of in- 
centive, and within this Book they discover 
their severest condemnation. 

The New Testament is therefore in the 
most extraordinary of senses a rational book. 
The avowal of a common and identical intelli- 
gence is audible in its every truth. The soul 
of this Book, however, accounts for its won- 
drous unity and potency; and that soul is 
Jesus Christ, Son of God, Son of man, the 
Brightness of the Father's glory, the Ex- 
press Image of His Person. 

As the world's Brother-Man, the true 
Democrat, the Kinsman who is closer to us 
than breathing and nearer than hands or feet, 
Jesus has incorporated Himself into the con- 
scious domain of aspiring souls everywhither. 
In our best moments He is one with us. In 
our highest reaches it is His pure and elo- 
quent blood that speaks in our cheeks, and 
His refined passion that asserts itself in our 
deed. It is His affiliation with all high, pro- 
gressive, idealizing instincts and energies la- 
tent and patent in the human soul, that in- 



Reason. 57 

vests the Incarnation with an indubitable 
certitude, and guarantees an ever-increasing 
efficiency. The democracy of Jesus, the com- 
monness of Jesus, the correspondences of 
Jesus, are shibboleths which the Church of 
the Living God may sound *^ alike in fright- 
ful alarms and in the tipsy mirth of univer- 
sal dissoluteness." No such claim can be 
made for Mohammed, for Buddha, for Con- 
fucius, for Socrates, for Zoroaster. No man 
can attain the vantage ground of love, of 
truth, of righteousness only as he is momen- 
tarily reinforced by Jesus Christ, who in 
Himself personalizes every principle of the 
Kingdom of God. Upon the elemental and 
ultimate forms of thought and action Jesus 
has impressed His name and seal. Easier 
would it be to untwist the iris-hued beauties 
of the rainbow from the sunbeam than to sep- 
arate the fundamental principles of the King- 
dom of God from the highest articulation of 
personal character. As every globule of 
water reflects the image of the sun, so every 
thought and thing, every man and measure 
that has within them a real and abiding merit, 



58 The Religion of a Person. 

throws back the image of Jesus Christ. The 
immeasurable channels for ethical and spir- 
itual activity that differentiate the days that 
now are, from the aforetime days, are the per- 
forations wrought by the Son of God through- 
out the sentient, thinking, acting universe. 
Through Him, and Him alone, the world 
mounts and mounts. His word and work 
have in them a spiritual ascension. In the 
symbolizing of Himself as the Light of the 
world, Jesus affirmed the fellowship of His 
nature with all men. Light resents all mo- 
nopoly. It is not an individual, but a univer- 
sal property. Every soul everywhither is 
bibulous of the sea of light. It is through the 
light, and the light alone, that all being, or- 
ganic and inorganic, is converted from ^*an 
indurated heterogeneous fabric'^ into '*a 
transparent fluid membrane." *^In Thy 
light shall we see light, ' ' is the prophetic an- 
ticipation of the word of Jesus; *^I am the 
Light of the world : he that f olloweth Me shall 
not walk in darkness, but shall have the light 
of life." 

The community of intelligence, which is 



Reason. 59 

but another phrasing for the universal qual- 
ity of all life, takes from the individual all 
pardon for egoistic impulses, for self-cen- 
tered whimsies, for circumscribed activities. 
He stands or falls with the weal or woe of 
Ms fellow-men. And all social science accepts 
this postulate. God has made of His world 
a huge instrumentality of means. All things, 
whether of matter, of mind, or of morals, are 
powers in transition. Within the wide range 
of universal being there is no sleep, no pause, 
no stagnation, but all things and all thoughts 
renew, germinate, and spring. Total growths, 
universal movements, eternal generations are 
the purposes of God now and for evermore. 
The labor of God is to create in all men a 
thought and a life approximating in large- 
ness and excellence the thought and life of 
Himself. This is the true community, the 
abiding identity for which the whole creation 
groans and travails in pain. 

IV. 

Eeason affirms the primacy of personality. 
The primal ground of all thought and expe- 



60 The Religion of a Person. 

rience is the unitary, abiding, determining 
self. Heraclitus was entirely within the 
province of sane thinking in his rejection of 
the mental and moral unchangeableness of the 
Eleatic school of philosophers. But Heracli- 
tus himself erred in his contention that the 
Lord of the universe was inherent in the ever- 
shifting flame of fire. Change and movement 
are indeed incontestable facts, but change and 
movement have for us no significance if per- 
manence is without existence. A flow of con- 
scious states without an abiding conscious 
self is a phantasm, not a fact. If a time con- 
sciousness is not fixated by a timeless self, 
then past or present is without meaning. 
Upon all experience, and upon all external re- 
ality, the thinking, determining, unitary self 
must impose the forms of thought, else they 
perish with their birth. Indeed, to speak 
with accuracy, experience and external re- 
ality find their generation and their explicit 
being solely through the primacy of per- 
sonality. In affirming the non-existence of 
all static being, of an unchangeable sub- 
stratum, this early but profound Greek phi- 



Reason. 61 

losoplier anticipated the tlieories announced 
centuries later by John Locke and by David 
Hume. These latter-day thinkers saw in sen- 
sations and in impressions the sole content of 
being. With them the mind was a blank, 
and with no power to be other than a blank. 
But to sensations and impressions they at- 
tributed powers of initiation and of achieve- 
ment of the most miracle-working character. 
Their conclusion was identical with that of 
Heraclitus. They conceived of all being as 
a perennial change, a ceaseless flux. Nothing 
in the thought of Heraclitus or of John Locke 
or of David Hume abode long enough to call 
itself I. 

In opposition to the contention of the Her- 
aclitean school was the Eleatic school of 
Greek thinkers. Xenophanes, the founder of 
this school, made of all being a solid block, im- 
movable and unchanged. ^' Being,'' he said, 
*^can not be divisible, since it is all alike, and 
there is no more of it in one place than in an- 
other to hinder it from holding together, nor 
less of it, but everything is full of what is." 
Xenophanes thus becomes the first of the 



62 The Religion of a Person. 

Pantlieists. Spinoza is his latter-day voice. 
All being is a fixity absolutely without mo- 
bility or mobile possibilities. As one has ob- 
served in criticism of the Eleatic school, 
*Hhey made the universe a fixed stare." In 
neither of these schools of thought is found 
a conception of the primal power which ad- 
mits of searching criticism. Identity with- 
out change is as inadmissible as change with- 
out identity. Unity there is in the universe, 
but it is a progressive unity. It is unity in 
transition. Change there is in the universe, 
but it is change inaugurated by an abiding, 
thoughtful, causal self. As a nineteenth cen- 
tury seer has written: **This incessant move- 
ment and progression which all things par- 
take, could never become sensible to us, but 
by contrast to some principle of fixture or 
stability in the soul. While the eternal gen- 
eration of circles proceeds, the eternal gen- 
erator abides. That central life is somewhat 
superior to creation, superior to kaowledge 
and thought, and contains all its circles." 
This is the true doctrine of finalitv. It is the 

« 

doctrine which satisfies thought and experi- 



Reason. 63 

ence. It wisely distinguislies between tlie 
personal and the impersonal, between tbe 
volitional and the mechanical, between God 
and His world, between man and his work. 

Life can be explained in no other terms. 
All postulates that do not make personality 
fundamental refute themselves. The infinite 
regress confronts us if an abiding, free in- 
telligence is not explanatory of all creation 
and of all progress. Ceaseless flows and 
rigid stares solve no problems. Contrari- 
wise, they complicate all problems. 

The Kingdom of God gives pre-eminence 
to personality, permanent and progressive, 
creative and conserving, identical and initi- 
ative. This pre-eminence found emphasis in 
the thought and word of prophet, apostle, 
and the Incarnate Son of God: Lord, Thou 
hast been our dwelling place in all genera- 
tions. ^'Before the mountains were brought 
forth or ever Thou hadst formed the earth 
and the world, even from everlasting to ever- 
lasting Thou art God." ^'The Eternal God 
is thy refuge, and underneath are the ever- 
lasting arms. " '' He prepared the heavens ; " 



64 The Religion of a Person. 

^^He set a compass upon the face of the 
depth;" **He established the clouds above;" 
**He strengthened the fountains of the 
deep;" **He gave to the sea His decree that 
the waters should not pass His command- 
ment." **By the word of the Lord were the 
heavens made, and all the host of them by 
the breath of His mouth; He gathereth the 
waters of the sea together as an heap; He 
layeth up the depth in storehouses. " ^ ' Know 
ye that the Lord He is God; it is He 
that hath made us, and not we ourselves." 
The modem philosophic phrase, the divine 
immanence, most appropriately characterizes 
the ministry of the Lord Jesus. God the Su- 
preme Mind, God the Supreme "Will, God the 
Supreme Heart, was the ever-recurrent 
thought and recognition of Jesus. He af- 
firmed with ceaseless repetition the firstness 
of God His Father and the Father of us all. 
In substance the ministry of Jesus had 
for its keynote the word: The heart which 
abandons itself to God finds itself related to 
all of the divine workmanship, and travels 
a royal road to all particular knowledge and 



Reason. 65 

power; in the place of communion with God 
we behold causes, and anticipate the slow but 
sure unfolding of universal being in perfect 
accord with all truth, with all beauty, with 
all goodness. God is the perennial miracle 
worker. We are holden in vision if we insist 
upon particular wonders. He who is keenly 
alert to the significance of personality can 
not do other than exclaim: '^I am born into 
the great, the universal mind. I, the imper- 
fect, adore my own Perfect. I am somehow 
receptive of the great soul, and thereby I do 
overlook the sun and the stars, and feel them 
to be but the fair accidents and effects which 
change and pass. More and more the surges 
of everlasting nature enter into me, and I 
become public and human in my regards and 
actions. So come I to live in thoughts and 
act with energies which are immortal.'^ 

An appreciation of personality profound 
and luminous was that of Socrates, as found 
in Plato's *^Phaedo:'^ ^^Our soul bears a 
strict resemblance to what is divine, immor- 
tal, intellectual, simple, indissolvable. You 
see, then, my dear Cebes, that the soul is al- 
ways the same and always like, and that our 
5 



66 The Religion of a Person. 

body does perfectly resemble what is human, 
mortal, sensible, compounded, dissolvable ; al- 
ways changing, and never like itself." 

The materialistic thinker, the sensual vo- 
tary, demand with the vociferations of an 
Ajax an ocular and tangible proof of God. 
Such a proof is inconceivable. But the ma- 
terialistic thinker, the sensual votary, may be 
answered in words of truth and soberness. 
You have no ocular and tangible proof of 
your own existence. Personality, infinite and 
finite, is beyond the range of picture making. 
As Sir William Hamilton declares, intelli- 
gence is unpicturable. But this ^^ sense den" 
clamor does not affect the fact that person- 
ality is basic, and without this basis thought 
collapses or loses itself in the infinite regress, 
and all movement comes to a perpetual pause. 
The impersonal explains nothing. Endless 
change, ^* fixed stares," flows of sensation, 
multiplicity of impressions, subjective pre- 
sentations, agitated nerve-centers confuse 
the problem of existence. The light that is 
in them is darkness. Immanuel Kant, the 
founder of German Idealism, performed an 
incalculable service for philosophy and for 



Reason. 67 

every-day living in Hs affirmations that the 
world without does not impose its necessity 
upon us, but that we impose laws upon it. 
All material existence, which we call sense 
experience, in itself, said Kant, is blind and 
without order. It is only through our im- 
position of the thought principles, which we 
call being, identity, quantity, quality, space, 
time, motion, number, etc., that order is 
brought out of the confusion, that vision suc- 
ceeds the blindness. Kant^s philosophy finds 
illustration in every-day life. The Congo 
African, with all the physical, sensuous prop- 
erties of a man, does not see the potentiality 
of Shakespeare's Coriolanus nor of Jere- 
miah's Prophecy in the letters of the alpha- 
bet. The American Indian, with a sensuous 
nature perhaps unparagoned, saw no city of 
Pittsburgh, the world's steel center, as he 
scaled the rocky bosom of the Alleghanies. 
The Greek helot and the Eoman Sybarite, 
with all their sensuous powers in full array, 
saw no opulent British Empire or American 
Eepublic latent in the mind and energies of 
the human race. Having physical eyes, the 
African, the Indian, the Greek, the Eoman 



68 The Religion of a Person. 

saw not. And why? Because of the non- 
imposition of the thought principles which 
underlie all articulate experience. 

The thinking personality, the volitional 
personality, the feeling personality accounts 
for life and its manifold expression. This 
Personality in relation to all creative work, 
past, present, and future, we denominate God. 
This personality in relation to nature trans- 
formed into art, past, present, and future, 
we denominate man. 

The voice of reason hastens to ascribe to 
God an absoluteness of wisdom, power, and 
love. To man it ascribes an efficiency in and 
through infinite wisdom, power, and love. 

V. 

In affirming the premiership of person- 
ality, reason cordially accepts all extraordi- 
nary manifestation of personal power in the 
realms of the physical and the psychical, if 
the extraordinary manifestation purifies, 
preserves, and promotes the ordinary order 
of life. If the common good is not advanced, 
then reason vehemently repudiates all ex- 
traordinary attempts, all extraordinary 



Reason. 69 

claims. The Christian religion being, as it is, 
the supreme word of a personal philosophy, 
of a personal efficiency, has no apology to 
make at the dictate of impersonal thinking. 
As the emphasis of personality it is aggres- 
sive, and not defensive, both in the spheres 
of thought and action. All interpreters of 
life that make any approach to completeness, 
are enthnsiastic subscribers to the word and 
to the work of Christianity. Jesns Christ is 
not a petitioner for our intellectual clemency, 
for our practical alms. In evangelic speech. 
His is the Power of God, He is the Wisdom 
of God. And the highest of efficiency be- 
comes ours, and the highest of wisdom also, 
in the loyal and loving appropriation of Him 
to ourselves. 

All of critical inquiry that has been made 
concerning the Son of God, from the view- 
point of an impersonal philosophy, has re- 
sulted in an unfriendly judgxaent. All crit- 
ical inquiry, however, concerning Him from 
the viewpoint of a personal philosophy has 
voiced its judgment in the words, *^My Lord 
and my God.'* 

If the world is an enclosed system, if it 



70 The Religion of a Person. 

is self-running, if it is measurable in terms 
physical, then the significance of the extraor- 
dinary, of the miraculous, may be ranked 
among the absurdities. But the world is in- 
finitely more than a ferment of chemical 
forces, despite HaeckePs '^Eiddle of the Uni- 
verse. ' ' The human will is smitten into inert- 
ness at the thought of self-activity being noth- 
ing more than a combination like unto that 
of acid and soda compound, in its beginning, 
and its end an effervescence variously de- 
scribed as conjugal loyalty, composition of 
poetry, philosophic speculation, the construc- 
tion of the Northern Pacific Railway, the 
writing of Paul's letter to the Corinthian 
Church. Our thoughts of mother, of wife, of 
child are unspeakably degraded when, in the 
terms of an impersonal philosophy, we de- 
clare that they are mere combinations of car- 
bon, of phosphorus, of lime, of water, with 
perhaps a sprinkling of salts. All philoso- 
phies after the order of Democritus, of 
Comte, of Haeckel, of Spencer avow the dif- 
ference between the sanguinary greed of a 
Shylock and the fraternal devotion of an An- 
tonio, between the lechery of a Henry the 



Reason, 71 

Eiglitli and the chastity of a William McKin- 
ley, between the sullen stupidity of a Borneo 
Dyak and the high culture of a Henry Drum- 
mond, measurable in the terms of chemistry, 
of mechanics, of physics. Such conclusions 
beget chaos, mental and moral. All life re- 
volts at them. Difficulties many and insuper- 
able confront us throughout the whole range 
of thought and experience. But their number 
is increased, and their height also, by imper- 
sonal thinking. The Christian faith is the 
aggressive protest against the making of per- 
sonal freedom, personal service, personal 
faith, personal prayer the labels on or the 
contents of a pharmacist's jar, the computed 
speed of a Baldwin locomotive, the under side 
of an agitated nerve-center. The Christian 
faith is the affirmation that all life, mountains 
and motes, waters and winds, gaseous com- 
pounds and organized charities, the operation 
of the cohesive principle and the activities of 
conscience, are interpretable in the terms of 
personality. Hence what we denominate as 
the extraordinary is in the last analysis In- 
finite Personality making itself known quite 
beyond our range of understanding. The f al- 



72 The Religion of a Person. 

lacy of violated or suspended physical law is 
plainly apparent, if the extraordinary is in 
helpful agreement with the ordinary. The 
prolonged skepticism as to the validity of 
the miracles recorded in the ministry of Jesus 
has rooted itself in impersonalism. It has 
been a persistent emphasis on the impossi- 
bility of God subordinating natural law, as 
though law natural or otherwise had any be- 
ing separate from the law-giver, the law- 
enforcer, the law-preserver. The true doc- 
trine of God and the world is the affirmation 
that all events, whether designated as natural 
or supernatural, as miraculous or common- 
place, are admissible if they sustain a vital 
connection with the mental and moral order 
of the world. Jesus as the Miracle Worker 
astonishes all finite thought. Jesus as Him- 
self the Miracle, smites us with reverential 
dumbness. He does not need multiplied 
loaves and fishes, subdued winds and waves, 
rejuvenated nerves, optical and auditory, 
healthy corpuscles in lieu of leprous taints, 
for the establishment of His character and 
His efficiency. 

These wondrous manifestations of His 



Reason. 73 

power we accept with devout thanksgiving. 
But they explain Jesus in no final sense. 
They are mere tracings of an order which 
the Infinite Personality adopts within pecul- 
iar temporal and spatial limitations. It is 
in the development and efficiency of all indi- 
vidual and social life that Jesus stands un- 
challenged as the Factor of factors. He is 
the Mental, the Moral, the Spiritual Dynamic 
of the past nineteen centuries. The effect 
which we denominate Anglo-Saxon character, 
Teutonic civilization, awakening of China and 
of Japan, commercial integrity, political 
purity, educational ideals, social service, in- 
dividual regeneration, individual efficiency, 
is in reality Jesus Christ made manifest in 
the man and in men. The principle of suffi- 
cient reason which demands an adequacy of 
preparation in the premises for the conclu- 
sion, asserts itself in stentorian tone that in- 
dividual and community life on the highest 
conceivable levels find in the Christ of God, 
and in Him alone, an adequacy of personal 
preparation. The American Eepublic, the 
British Empire, the University of Berlin, 
Florence Nigthingale, John Knox, Joseph 



74 The Religion of a Person. 

Neesima, Alexander Hamilton, George White- 
field, the new Japan, the aroused China are 
not explicable in the terms of Mohammendan- 
ism, of Confucianism, of Buddhism, of Pla- 
tonism, of Impersonalism. Jesus Christ 
alone explains them. He is Himself the Mir- 
acle, in the light of which all extraordinary 
natural phenomena are utterly inferior. 
George A. Gordon gave full-circled interpre- 
tation to the significance of Jesus in the sen- 
tences : * ^ Our whole thought of God and man ; 
our entire working philosophy of life; our 
modes of intellectual vision, types of feeling, 
habits of will ; our instinctive, customary, ra- 
tional, emotional, institutional and social ex- 
istence is everywhere encompassed and inter- 
penetrated by Christ. His empire over our 
civilization is complete in this sense, that it 
expands only under His power and can not 
define or describe itself except in terms of 
His teaching and character. We are here 
under the shadow of an Infinite Name ; we are 
living and dying in the heart of an Enfolding 
Presence. We are compelled to acknowledge 
that the secret molding energy of our entire 
civilization is the mind of Christ. It is out 



Reason. 75 

of this consciousness of the indwelling, wide- 
spreading, and overruling mind of Christ 
that the belief conies in His Essential Deity.'' 
Beason, while affirming Jesus to be the 
Factor of factors in all history since His in- 
coming into the world, makes cordial use of 
the confession of John Stuart Mill in his 
** Essays on Nature" as to the historical re- 
ality of the Son of God : '*It is of no use," re- 
marks Mr. Mill, *^to say that Christ as ex- 
hibited in the Gospels is not historical, and 
that we know not how much of what is admir- 
able has been superadded by the tradition of 
His followers. Who among His disciples, or 
among their proselytes, was capable of in- 
venting the sayings described as those of 
Jesus, or of imagining the life and character 
revealed in the Gospels? Certainly not the 
fishermen of Galilee, still less the early Chris- 
tian writers." 



Chapter III. 
RIGHTEOUSNESS. 



*-"^ 



Life is not as idle ore, 
But iron dug from central gloom. 
And heated hot with burning fears, 
And dipped in baths of hissing tears. 
And battered with the shocks of doom. 

To shape and use. Arise and fly 
The reeling Faun, the sensual feast; 
Move upward, working out the beast, 

And let the ape and tiger die. 

—TENNYSON. 

Thrice is he armed, that hath his quarrel just; 
And he but naked, though locked up in steel, 
Whose conscience with injustice is corrupted. 

—SHAKESPEARE. 



EIGHTEOUSNESS. 
I. 

**The Kingdom of God is righteousness 
... in the Holy Spirit.'* And righteous- 
ness is straightness. Perversities of thought, 
of word, of action, are alien to the complete 
order of life. Mockery, of whatever kind, has 
found itself speedily discomfited. God's 
world is not an expediency, nor a diplomacy. 
Things and thoughts artificial and arbitrary 
can not endure. '* Truth clad in hell fire,'* 
to employ Carlyle's phrase, converts to a 
cinder all semblance and writes the laws un- 
derlying all individual and social life. It is 
the vanity of vanities to build or plot or com- 
bine against the integral order of being. The 
Eoman Cicero spoke an inviolable word in 
the sentence, Bes nolunt diu male adminis- 
trari — ** Things are unwilling to be badly 
administered long. ' ' Circumstance and cause 
unite in the punishment of the tortuous 
thinker and doer. A mathematical exactness 

79 



80 The Religion of a Person. 

asserts itself amid all rigors and felicities of 
condition and event. The wise man is cog- 
nizant of the inability of any man to talk or 
vote away the righteous integrity of the 
world. This righteous integrity the wise man 
interprets in terms personal. He readily dis- 
cerns all life to be a personal efficiency. He 
sees the wholeness of God everywhere. He 
makes no attempt to separate the good from 
the law underlying it, nor does he dedicate 
his ingenuity to the detachment of the sensual 
sweet from the moral sweet, the sensual fair 
from the moral fair. Eightness of thinking, 
of saying, of doing he sees as the purest of 
sympathy with universal ends. It is man 
resting his own will on the universal effi- 
ciency. It is the abiding consciousness that 
God is, and that He is the rewarder of all who 
diligently seek Him perennially and every- 
whither. The life of straightness is the af- 
firmation that all things material, mental, and 
moral find their order and their orbit in per- 
sonality pure and productive. It is the ne- 
gation of the firstness of the impersonal, of 
the impure, of the inactive. Materialistic 
philosophy is not the presiding and produc- 



Righteousness. 81 

tive genius in any sphere of being. Its tend- 
ency is downward, not upward. It would in- 
terpret all thought, all speech, all doing in 
the terms of cloud banks, of chemical atoms, 
of time spaces. The philosophy of personal- 
ism, however, has nothing of consent for the 
assumption that the man, whether African 
Hottentot, Chinese coolie, Russian peasant, 
American reformer, can be estimated by his 
weight in pounds and ounces, or that this 
reaching, radiating, ejaculating fellow is 
wrapped up in a skin black, yellow, or white. 
As straight thinking, righteousness is the 
ceaseless emphasis on personality in its high- 
est form. The ulterior aim of planets crys- 
tallizing and disintegrating, of the subsidence 
and upheaval of continents, of the assimila- 
tion of elements carbonic, nitrogenic, aqueous, 
by all vegetative life, of the animation of 
beasts and birds, is the conversion of planets, 
of continents, of seas, of birds, of beasts, of 
rose and fruit into that finest and most force- 
ful of particulars, which we call man. As a 
discerning writer puts it: *^A11 events are 
sub-persons. They grow on the same stem 
with persons.'^ 
6 



B2 The Religion of a Person. 

We make or unmake ourselves by fhe esti- 
mate wMch we give to G-od, to ourselves, and 
to the manifold world about us. The gross 
doer is the product of gross tbinking. Tbe 
mental process wbicb makes tbe soul synony- 
mous witb tbe stomacb converts tbe man into 
a mere sack, an ig-nominious piece of nerve, 
muscle, and bone baggage, a rotten link in tbe 
universal cbain. Sucb a tbinker casts tbe 
blame for bis debaucbery on fate. He con- 
ceives in bis intellectual confusion tbat tbe 
rude and invincible elements of nature are 
against bim. Tbe windy conceits of perverse 
tbougbt find mucb of vent in discussions of 
destiny, of birtb-star, of life as an iron ne- 
cessity. Sbakespeare in bis **King Lear" is 
a grapbic limner of tbe crooked tbinker. 
**Tbis," says tbe Saxon poet, *4s tbe excel- 
lent foppery of tbe world, tbat wben we are 
sick in fortune — often tbe surfeit of our own 
bebaviour — we make guilty of our diasters 
tbe sun, tbe moon, and tbe stars; as if we 
were villains by necessity; fools by beavenly 
compulsion; knaves, tbieves, and traitors by 
spberical predominance; drunkards, liars, 
and adulterers by an enforced obedience of 



Righteousness. 83 

planetary influence; and all that we are evil 
in by a divine thrusting on : an admirable eva- 
sion of an adulterous beast to lay his goatish 
disposition to the charge of a star!'' 

Accurate thinking is an indispensable 
condition of wise living. We can not rightly 
and effectively use any personal faculty save 
as our thought finds itself in agreement with 
the principles of universal being. So far as a 
man thinks sanely is he free. All parley rela- 
tive to economical freedom, to political free- 
dom, to industrial freedom, to social freedom 
is wholly removed from a thoroughly sensible 
interpretation of life. Epictetus, the Greek 
slave, knew nothing of freedom economical, 
political, industrial, social. He was the play- 
thing, he was the chattel, he was the butt of 
ridicule of his pseudo-free master. Eeplying 
to a Eoman orator who boasted of his mate- 
rial wealth and of his capacity to enjoy it, 
Epictetus said: *^I do not want such things. 
And, besides, you are poorer than I am, after 
all. You have silver vessels, but earthenware 
reasons, principles, appetites. My mind is to 
me a kingdom, and it furnishes me with abun- 
dant and happy occupation. All your pes- 



84 The Religion of a Person. 

sessions seem small to you; mine seem great 
to me.'* In the meditations of this Greek 
serf we read snch entertaining words as 
these: ^^ Outward circumstances are not our 
masters ; where a man can live at all, he can 
also live well. A wise man is out of the reach 
of fortune, and attempts upon him are no 
more than Xerxes' arrows; they may darken 
the day, but they can not strike the sun.'' 
**You may fetter my leg, but my will not 
even Zeus himself can overpower." ^^For a 
man to spend his life in pursuit of a title 
which serves only when he dies to furnish an 
epitaph, is below a wise man's business." 
*^It is the edge and temper of the blade that 
makes a good sword, not the richness of the 
scabbard; and so it is not money and pos- 
sessions that make a man considerable, but 
his virtue. Every man is worth just as much 
as the things about which he busies him- 
self." 

All thought bursts into appearance. It 
refuses to be concealed. It publishes itself 
as the light. It seeks a marriage with the 
world without. Ourselves in colossi or in 
minutiae, we are evermore visualizing, mak- 



Righteousness. 85 

ing tangible, making andible. Of stars and 
seas, of pea-pods, of beetles as truly as 
of our fellows and our thought we make the 
spiracles, the antennaB of our character and 
our aims. False mental postulates are 
plagues that return to torment us. Concep- 
tions of God, of man, of the world which in 
themselves are perhaps negligible, such as 
August Comte's positivism, John Lockers 
sensationalism, Spencer's evolutionism, have 
in their application to life proven themselves 
mischievous in the extreme. No word other- 
wise than felicitous can be said of the per- 
sonal character of Mr. Spencer or of John 
Locke. But the union of their philosophy 
with the complex social, industrial, political, 
religious phenomena of the human race has 
thus far had as its offspring disheartenment, 
unbelief, fear, and a pestilent host of antago- 
nisms. John Locke, the devout believer in 
the Christian faith; Herbert Spencer, the 
ideal friend and citizen, did not remotely 
dream that misguided enthusiasts would re- 
pudiate the charm and strength of their char- 
acter and apply to all experience the postu- 
lates and conclusions of their philosophy. If 



86 The Religion of a Person. 

sucli liad been their dream, leniency of judg- 
ment wonld lead lis to believe that John Locke 
would not have affirmed the impotency of the 
human mind as opposed to the material 
world, nor that Mr. Spencer would have af- 
firmed all thought and will to be the resultant 
of nervous agitations. These philosophies 
materialize God as truly as they materialize 
man. The practical issue of such philoso- 
phies is the carnival of brute force, the de- 
grading dominance of physical appetencies 
over all mental and moral passion, the final 
conversion of the soul of Plato, of Paul, of 
Moses, of Florence Nightingale into veritable 
clods of loam and clay. Such philosophies 
find voice in Emerson's strain: 

" The horseman serves the horse, 

The neatherd serves the neat. 
The merchant serves the purse. 

The eater serves his meat ; 
'T is the day of the chattel, 

Web to weave, and corn to grind ; 
Things are in the saddle 

And ride mankind." 

There is no thinkable mischief afoot that 
does not find its final rootage in a material- 



Righteousness. 87 

istic, impersonal body of thought. The elim- 
ination of God the Infinite Personality from 
His place of priority and power, the subor- 
dination of man the finite personality to his 
physical surrounding, to the transmitted 
qualities of his ancestry, to racial experience, 
to social custom, can and do have but one ul- 
timate: individual and social degradation, 
disaster, despair, death. It was an imper- 
sonal philosophy deeply seated in the French 
nation for decades and centuries which finally 
flashed forth in fiery fury in the closing days 
of the eighteenth century. It was the repu- 
diation of the spirit and the ascendency of the 
senses which brought to an opprobrious end 
the so-called Holy Eoman Empire. It was 
the committal of the Spanish Kingdom to the 
mere material wealth of the Western world 
which led to its undoing. The American Col- 
onies would not have been ruled by Great 
Britain with a conscienceless authority in the 
eighteenth century had Great Britain itself 
been under the dominance of a personal phi- 
losophy. Historians assert that John Locke 
for thirty years or more was the most pro- 
nounced intellectual force in, England, and was 



88 The Religion of a Person. 

in considerable degree a most vital factor in 
shaping political policies. Between tlie years 
of Ms activity, 1670-1704, it does not require 
the genius of a fancy weaver to see the whole 
of the political thought of the British Empire 
saturated with the doctrines of impersonal- 
ism. Locke's philosophy was also an influ- 
ential factor in the religious life of England 
and Continental Europe. In France the ar- 
rogance of unbelief found utterance in Hel- 
vetius, who essentially declared, the sole mo- 
tive of our acts is egoism and self-interest, 
and the most exalted virtues reduce them- 
selves to self-love and a desire for pleasure. 
In the entirely unmoral and mechanical world 
which results, God is neither capable of being 
proved nor is there any need whatever for 
Him. The philosophy of Locke making the 
finite personality the mere plaything of ideas, 
the bat and the ball of unconscious experi- 
ence, the Jack-in-the-box of fleeting sensation, 
permeated the thought and the practice of the 
English people to their religious detriment 
for a half century or more. It was not until 
the ministry of John and Charles Wesley and 
George Whitefield began, in the middle of 



Righteousness. 89 

the eigliteen'tli century, that the philosophies 
of impersonalism found counteraction. In 
France, Helvetius, Condillac, Voltaire, Rous- 
seau gave practical reaffirmation to Locke's 
impersonalism in the utter social and politi- 
cal and religious debauchery of the Revolu- 
tion. The necessity for righteous thinking, 
for straight thinking, for the thinking that 
concretes itself in whatsoever things are true, 
honest, just, pure, lovely, and of good report, 
is a necessity that is absolute and universal. 
The bond of connection between thought- 
processes and practical endeavor is apparent 
to the thinking man. To think is to act, re- 
marks Mr. Emerson. At first glance one 
might say that Mr. Emerson had relegated 
all life to the sphere of the abstract, but a 
further contemplation invests his affirmation 
with an incontestable reality. Thought is the 
initial step in all action. It is the begetter of 
all action. In thought, all legitimate en- 
deavor lives, moves, and has its being. Per- 
sonality resists all attempt at division. We 
can not say that the thinking man, the deter- 
mining man, the achieving man are three dis- 
tinct individuals. They are one. Correct 



90 The Religion of a Person. 

analyses of personality snbmit as their find- 
ings the complete fusion and interfusion of 
thought, will, and action. Each becomes the 
other throughout the complex phenomena of 
life. The political man, the industrial man, 
the religious man are not the inhabitants of 
diverse kingdoms. The necessity is upon 
every individual man to concrete himself gov- 
ernmentally, industrially, religiously, artis- 
tically, and otherwise. No sphere of sane 
thinking and of sane doing is to find in us an 
alien. The Kingdom of God is without 
boundary line, inasmuch as it is the Kingdom 
of personality. Hence the man, the finite 
thinker, must pierce all form, overleap all 
apparent walls, discover intrinsic likeness be- 
tween remote things and reduce multiplicity 
to unity. Philosophic thought has brought 
itself into disrepute with painful frequency 
through its failure to relate the thinking man 
to the acting man. While attempting to give 
systematic interpretation to reality, it has 
often denied the existence of reality exclusive 
of the speculative, and then has oscillated to 
the other extreme in the denial of all reality 
exclusive of the sensuous. 



Righteousness, 91 

Aristophanes, in Hs comedy, ^^Tlie 
Clouds,'* pilloried Socrates as the arch- Soph- 
ist and represented him as the inhabitant of a 
nebulous world, uttering a deal of nonsense 
which was supposed to be philosophy. 
Goethe in his ' ' Faust ' ' shared Aristophanes *s 
opinion when he made Mephistopheles say, 
**A speculating fellow is like a beast on a 
blasted heath, led around in circles by an 
evil spirit, while all about are pastures fair 
and green/' John Milton, of whom Dryden 
wrote, * ' The force of nature could no further 
go,'' had even less of value for philosophic 
thought than Goethe or Aristophanes, as evi- 
denced in his depiction of devils holding 
high debate over 

" Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute, 
And found no end in wandering mazes lost." 

And a latter-day philosopher of profound 
and lasting quality, with charming candor 
gives aid and comfort to Aristophanes, 
Goethe, and Milton in the observation : ** Non- 
sense and pernicious errors mingle in about 
equal proportions in philosophical literature. 
Many a navigator has sailed away over the 



92 The Religion of a Person. 

misty seas of speculation and never come 
back; and many an ambitious climber, imi- 
tating the * Excelsior' youth, has climbed out 
of sight and never returned to earth again. 
Fog banks have often been mistaken for land, 
and islands of mist have passed for solid con- 
tinents. A fearful proportion of philosoph- 
ical discussion at best is barren and often per- 
nicious. . . . We might well conclude, then, 
that we should let philosophy alone as at 
best a useless science. But," observes our 
philosopher, with exceeding wisdom, ** unfor- 
tunately this can not be done. Every one 
has a philosophy of some sort, wittingly or 
unwittingly. Every one has some notions 
about reality, the nature of things, the mean- 
ing and outcome of life, and the like; and 
these constitute his philosophy. Monsieur 
Jourdain, in Moliere's play, talked prose all 
his life without knowing it, and many per- 
sons do the same thing with philosophy. For 
philosophy is simply an attempt to give an 
account of experience, or it is a man's way 
of looking at things. . . . It is not, then, 
a question of having or not having a phi- 
losophy, but of having a good or a bad one." 



Righteousness. 93 

Hence our original postulate, tlie Kingdom 
of righteousness is a kingdom of straight 
thinking, finds universal application. The 
philosopher must escape all crookedness in 
his thought movements, else fill a niche in 
Milton's ^^ Limbo large and broad the para- 
dise of fools. '^ A philosophy that finds its 
beginning and its end in the life of the senses, 
a philosophy that assumes a humility like 
unto that of Dickens' Uriah Heap, and calls 
itself agnostic, a philosophy that explains 
electric energy, rock strata, filial affection, 
and political stability in terms of molecules 
and atoms clashing and co-operating, can not 
do other than discredit the moral and spir- 
itual aspirations of humankind. Such philos- 
ophies are figuratively describable as wither- 
ing siroccos, destructive typhoons, desert 
sands, Cimmerian darkness, serpents in lieu 
of fish, stones in lieu of bread. The animism 
of the early Greeks which gave to all stones, 
all sands, all seas, all winds, indeed, to 
all material life, the personal properties, 
thought, will, emotion, of necessity degraded 
the true appreciation of personality. In all 
nature they saw powers beneficent and malefi- 



94 The Religion of a Person, 

cent. And these powers they interpreted as 
lawless. For them the world was an anarch- 
istic world. Anything whatever could hap- 
pen was their conclusion. The restraints and 
constraints of freedom, the power of mind 
over matter, the efficiency of the will, the su^ 
premacy of Infinite Mind and Heart, the loya} 
and loving co-operation of man with God^ 
were wholly alien to their animistic philoso- 
phy. The npspringing of magic, of charms ; 
the offering of gifts with which to blind the 
eyes of innumerable gods, spirits, and de- 
mons, was the inevitable consequent of such a 
philosophy. The later Greeks in their search 
for a principle of unity did not discern in 
personality an ultimate. Thales alHirmed wa- 
ter; Heraclitus, fire; Anaxagoras, reason 
composed of very fine and mobile particles of 
matter; Leucippus, mind composed of ex- 
ceedingly fine and active fine atoms. Varia- 
tions of these postulates came from Xenopha- 
nes, Parmenides, Anaximenes, Empedocles, 
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Socrates, 
whom Plato in his *^Crito'' called ^Hhe 
wisest, the justest, and the best of all the men 
whom I have ever known,'' was not in the 



Righteousness. 95 

light of our Christian day a profound inter- 
preter of the infinite personality, as evidenced 
in his dying words, **Crito, I owe a cock to 
-^sculapius (the god of the healing art) ; will 
you remember to pay the debt?" Between 
Greek speculations and Greek practices a 
bond of connection was assuredly existent. 
The philosophy which assigns to matter the 
first place can have no other issue than that 
of physical servitude for the weak, of gross 
indulgence of appetite, of purchasable man- 
hood and womanhood, of corrupt religious 
practice. Epicureanism, Cynicism, Hedon- 
ism, Stoicism, are the fully anticipated fruit- 
age of impersonal philosophies. 

Christian philosophy in its affirmation of 
fundamental being makes no subscription to 
the word of Thales, of Heraclitus, of Anaxa- 
goras, of Leucippus, of Plato, of Aristotle, of 
Anaximenes, nor does it in any sense align 
itself with the dualistic and monistic philoso- 
phies of modem days which make of person- 
ality the product of impersonalism. The 
world has not yet come to an appreciation of 
the sound thinking of the prophets and apos- 
tles. They affirmed a metaphysics, a theism, 



96 The Religion of a Person. 

an ethics toward which the philosophers of 
Greece and of recent times have agonizingly 
climbed. They approached all life from the 
personal side. They gave no primacy to wa- 
ter, to earth, to fire, to a material reason, to 
physical energy. In their thought God is, 
and beside Him there is no other. Before the 
mountains were brought forth or ever the 
earth and the world found formation, even 
from everlasting to everlasting He is God. 
Concerning man their word is: **And God 
said, Let us make man in our image, after 
our likeness;" ^^In Him we live and move 
and have our being.'' Concerning man and 
his relatedness to the physical world their 
word is : ^ ^ Thou madest him to have domin- 
ion over the works of Thy hands : Thou hast 
put all things under his feet.'' Plato and 
Aristotle found themselves repeatedly in the 
toils of dualism. Beyond the world of change 
and generation they affirmed a world of pure 
thought, without relation to the world of mat- 
ter — a world universal, changeless, complete. 
In their attempt to preserve the divine per- 
fection they sacrifice the divine immanence in 
the world process. God in their philosophy 



Righteousness. 97 

liad no need of the world process. As Pure 
Form, as tlie Idea of the Good, God in their 
thought was causally efficient, not as an ever- 
present active agent, but simply as an ideal. 
Thus no real connection between God and the 
world of matter was possible or needful. 
Aristotle's entelechy, the potential actualized, 
was not a living, transcendent personality re- 
alizing itself in uttermost wisdom, power, and 
love, but a determination of physical changes 
by reference to the realization of an end. 
The form thus became a cause. And the form 
in his thought is equivalent to what we call 
the concept. A great gulf is between the 
crude conceptions of Thales, Heraclitus, De- 
mocritus and Plato and Aristotle. But Plato 
and Aristotle saw in things an opposition to 
thought, to will, to feeling, and gave as the 
conclusion of their profound speculation a 
barren abstraction. The Middle Age philos- 
ophies, Nominalism and Eealism — the first 
affirming the reality of individuals and deny- 
ing the existence of the concept or class, the 
second affirming the existence of the concept 
or class and denying the reality of the indi- 
viduals^ — ^were but a war of words. Modern 
7 



98 The Religion of a Person. 

pMlosopliy, represented by Descartes, Spi- 
noza, Leibniz, Locke, Hume, Comte, Hegel, 
Spencer, has not always been the npspringing 
of a day-star, but with great frequency has 
darkened counsel by words without knowl- 
edge. Descartes made of the world two dis- 
tinct substances, mind and matter, and sep- 
arated God as the more ultimate reality from 
both of them. Spinoza identified God with 
the necessary laws of the physical universe, 
denying outright the divine personality, the 
government of the world according to pur- 
pose, and the freedom of the will. Leibniz 
affirmed all souls and all things to be centers 
of force having the principle of life and de- 
velopment wholly within their own nature. 
The life of each of these centers of force, 
which he termed monads, is a thought-life, a 
life of perceptual activity. In the things, 
Leibniz declared, the thought-life was con- 
fused. In the souls, he declared, the thought- 
life had come to at least a partial conscious- 
ness of itself. Locke, Hume, Comte, Hegel, 
Spencer are partial reaffirmations of the 
thought of these three distinguished modern 
philosophers. Above all these modem think- 



Righteousness. 99 

ers Immanuel Kant gave proximate expres- 
sion to the doctrine of personalism and its re- 
latedness to the world. He affirmed that the 
world is the creation of personal power, and 
that, but for the efficiency of personality, the 
world would have no being. As to finite per- 
sonality, he declared that, while the world as 
an objective system is the creation of God, yet 
it has no meaning for us only as we impose 
upon it the principles which underlie our 
thought-life. These principles, he affirmed, 
are not our creation, but are the regulative 
ideas of the rational life. According to Kant, 
nature does not impose its necessity on us, 
but it is we who give laws to nature. The 
bond of connection, he declared, between man 
and the world is God. The philosophy which 
would make of matter a solid and substantial 
fact, and erect nature into a system with 
which God would have to reekon, found itself 
undermined by the Kantian doctrine, which, 
while not wholly successful, had endeavored 
to trace all experience back to the synthetic 
unity of the self. Since the day of Kant all 
tendencies toward an atheistic, impersonal 
world have been short-lived. Comte's brag- 



100 The Religion of a Person. 

gadocio, ^^ Science will finally conduct God 
to tlie frontier and bow Him out with thanks 
for His provisional services/* has been re- 
peatedly put to rout since the day of its ut- 
terance. God is more fundamental to-day to 
sound thinking than ever before in the 
world's history. We simply can not move 
without Him. It is only in and through Him 
that any new departures in whatever sphere 
of being are possible. It is only in and 
through Him that perpetuity in whatever 
sphere of being is possible. He is before all 
things, and by Him all things consist. The 
natural world is now accepted by complete 
thought as nothing more than the tracing of 
the order in which God proceeds for the work- 
ing of His will, for the articulation of His 
wisdom. No man, whether philosopher or 
peasant, savage or saint, need stand in awe 
of nature as a blind piece of mechanism, nor 
as the dwelling place of sanguinary gods, 
spirits, or demons. The world is a personal 
world. God is the Besetting Eeality, the 
World Ground, the Father of all finite souls, 
the Infinite Worker, the One altogether 
lovely. Christian philosophy, the philosophy 



Righteousness. 101 

of the "Word of the Living God, thus has es- 
tablished itself within the profonndest of 
speculative thought. The material world has 
reality, but it is a reality issuing from, per- 
petuated by, and wholly dependent upon God. 
And man finds his efficiency in the material 
world in and through the ever-present, ever- 
working, ever-helping God. 

II. 

Eighteousness is straightness of speaking 
and doing. The thinker must become a voice, 
a deed. Thought must enter into nuptial 
bonds with nature. Life demands a whole- 
ness of expression. Perverse thinking finds 
its otherness in perverse doing. Men do not 
gather grapes of thorns nor figs of thistles. 
Impersonal philosophies are at the mercy of 
things. A personal philosophy commands 
things. Impersonalism makes of the world a 
mechanism. Personalism makes of the world 
a willing servant. The one esteems nature 
as rooted and fast; the other as fluid, and 
subject to intelligent touch. Impersonalism 
gives priority to the life of the senses. Per- 
sonalism gives priority to the life of thought, 



102 The Religion of a Person, 

of will, of emotion. Impersonalism makes 
nature absolute. Personalism makes na- 
ture ian effect. No fact is truer than that 
the depravations of the soul find their begin- 
ning and their perpetuity in impersonal phi- 
losophies. Things are ultimates, is the per- 
ennial thesis of the wrongdoer. Thus he sur- 
renders himself to the dominance of things. 
The perversity of impersonal, materialistic 
philosophy is manifest in the world of action. 
The helpfulness of a personal philosophy is 
manifest in the world of action. Hence the 
one may be most fitly characterized as tortu- 
ous thinking, and the other as straight think- 
ing, as right thinking. 

He who makes the world a personal effi- 
ciency is the true master of the world. He 
finds in every kingdom of life the raw ma- 
terial which may be molded into the useful 
and the beautiful. He forges the subtile and 
delicate air into words of wisdom and melody, 
and gives them wings as angels of persuasion 
and command. Witness the moving elo- 
quence of Edmund Burke, the oratorios of 
Handel, the telegraph of Samuel Morse, the 
telephone of Alexander Graham Bell 1 Eight 



Righteousness. 103 

thinking makes all nature glorious with form, 
with color, with emotion. There is no planet, 
however remote ; no chemical property, from 
the rudest crystal to the rosy law of life in 
an infant's cheek; no principle of growth, 
from the eye of a leaf to the coral reef and 
antediluvian coal deposits; no animal func- 
tion, from the polyp up to Homer's Ajax — 
hut that hints or thunders to man the integ- 
rity of God and of God's world. Hence, na- 
ture is ever the ally of religion. Its pomp 
and wealth invest the religious sentiment. 

The very bone and marrow, the heart and 
extremities of nature are penetrated by the 
ethical sentiment. Nature wisely used is man 
at his best. Nature unwisely used is man at 
his worst. Natural processes, representing 
as they do God's presence and power, are in 
reality moral sentences. At the center of all 
being — material, mental, moral — is the will of 
God radiating ever to the circumference. In 
reality all things and all thoughts preach to 
us. It is woe unto us if we heed not the 
preaching. It is weal unto us if we give the 
preaching a willing ear, a loving heart, a 
ready hand. Eight conceptions of God are. 



104 The Religion of a Person. 

in the last analysis, inspiring visions of 
God. 

Fundamental to all nobility of character 
and conduct is our appreciation of God. The 
sensuous votary known in every-day speech 
as the sinner, the criminal, the evildoer, es- 
says the impossible task of living in and util- 
izing the world with no thought of and with 
no love toward Him who is the Upholder 
of all things by the word of His power. That 
such essays are unspeakably foolish, all his- 
tory affirms. Shakespeare's Macbeth is typ- 
ical of the sensuous votary in his tribute to 
the witch Hecate and her brood. Eager to 
know the culmination of his ambition, the 
Scotch thane sought the counsel of these 
earthly perversions, withered and wild in 
their attire, with choppy fingers, skinny lips, 
and bearded face. God's world he trans- 
formed into a witch's caldron with its mix- 
ture of toads, of snakes, of bats, of adder, of 
lizard, of owlet, of worm, of hemlock. Such 
an elimination of God from the aspirations 
and activities of individual life perforce find 
their ultimate in Macbeth 's monstrous mono- 
logue : 



Righteousness. 105 

" To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow. 
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day. 
To the last syllable of recorded time ; 
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools 
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle ! 
Life 's but a walking shadow, a poor player 
Tnat struts and frets his hour upon the stage. 
And then is heard no more : it is a tale 
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. 
Signifying nothing." 

Macbeth 's resort to the witchery of He- 
cate finds its prototype in the resort of the 
Greeks to the oracles of Jupiter at Dodona, 
of Apollo at Delphi, of Trophonins in Bceo- 
tia, of -^scnlapius at Epidaums. Eustling 
tree branches at Dodona, the mutterings of 
the priestless Pythia at Delphi, sleeping in 
the temple of ^sculapius, entering by night 
the cave of Trophonins, had, in the thought 
of the greatest of the Greeks, Socrates, Ma- 
chines, Thncydides, Mschylus, Sophocles, 
Pericles, Aristides, Themistocles, a virtue 
transcendently divine. A faithful rendering 
of the likeness of the world issued, so they 
averred, from these insane mouthers, from 
these grewsome temples and caverns. We 
can not conceive of God delegating Himself 



106 The Religion of a Person. 

to sucli hypocrisies, to such puerile whimsies, 
to such gross agencies. It is the law of life 
that what is put in conies out. Like produces 
like. Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall 
he also reap. No man can secure a good 
which does not belong to him. The world is 
alive not primarily with forces chemical, 
physical, mechanical, but with forces moral. 
The fatal and fortunate strength of moral 
force is seen in all life. The Hindoo Scrip- 
tures have in them this gem of truth: **Law 
it is, which is without name, or color, or 
hands, or feet ; which is smallest of the least, 
and largest of the large; all, and knowing 
all things; which hears without ears, sees 
without eyes, moves without feet, and seizes 
without hands." Eescuing the Hindoo defi- 
nition from the realm of impersonalism, we 
would say it is God who comprehends and 
transcends all life, and in whom we and all 
things live, move, and have our being. Greek 
civilization rooted itself in the impersonal, 
in the sensuous, and its end could not be other 
than death. Like produced like; their reap- 
ing was in complete agreement with their 
sowing. 



Righteousness. 107 

The Cliristian conception of God and man 
has been the enduring, the inspiring, the 
achieving motive in the life of the race. The 
advent of Jesus Christ in the world has been 
the real enlightenment of all thought, of all 
speech, of all action. He is the world's mild, 
equable radiance. He is the world's aw- 
ful splendor. What of immortality is to be 
found in Plato, in Aristotle, in Socrates, in 
Seneca, in Marcus Aurelius, in Pericles, in 
Cicero, and other ancient worthies of all 
peoples and climes, is attributable first and 
last to their anticipation of, and to their par- 
ticipation in, the thought and service of the 
Christ of God. In Joseph the carpenter's 
Son, the Prophet of Nazareth, the veritable 
Power, the veritable Wisdom of God, is found 
incarnate all reality, all truth, all love, all 
purity. For His coming all men, Greek, Ro- 
man, Jew, Asiatic, who aspired to a holiness 
that was wise, to a wisdom that was holy 
looked with eager eye. For God, and not 
the symbol of God, all true men yearn and 
seek. And in Jesus Christ the inmost heart 
and the generic secret of God we discover. 
The inner harmony of a personal world we 



108 The Religion of a Person. 

see and hear in Him. The oracles at Dodona, 
at Delphi, at Epidanrns can have no meaning 
now for the pious Greek. He has heard the 
voice of Him who is the Wisdom of Grod. 
He walks in the light of Him who is the 
True Light, indeed the Light of the world. 
In the burst of His radiance all philosophies, 
all practices may have their goings made 
sure. The world is now the grand sphere of 
worship. No part of it is alien to God. He 
is the fullness of winds, of waves, of stars, 
of stones, of all life, organic and inorganic. 
He alone is their being. They are His forth- 
putting. Through Him they consist. We can 
not by an imaginative fashioning re-inaugu- 
rate the philosophies of Thales, Heraclitus, 
Anaximenes, Leucippus, Aristotle, Spencer, 
Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hegel, Comte. 
As systems they did not work. They were 
not able to withstand the onslaughts of prac- 
tical life. They were palsied with fear in the 
presence of grim and aggressive realities. In 
the every-day world they were strangers and 
foreigners. They could not find for them- 
selves under any sun a permanent base of 
operation. Under their direction men looked 



Righteousness. 109 

down, and not up; for tliem there was no 
open heaven. As generalizations they were 
as short-lived as the decades. In them 
the spirit of life was not. They worked 
no reform. The degradation of woman- 
hood, the depreciation of childhood, the 
laxity of marriage, the knee-crooking knav- 
ery in the affairs of State, the obsequious 
bondage of the vast body of humankind 
flounted themselves in the face of Greek phi- 
losophies. And Greek philosophers ate their 
meal in fear and slept in the affliction of ter- 
rible dreams. Despite Thales and his school, 
despite Heraclitus and his school, notwith- 
standing Xenophanes, Pythagoras, Plato, 
Aristotle and their enthusiastic disciples, 
treason did its worst in Athens, in Sparta, in- 
deed throughout all Hellas. Likewise may we 
affirm of the impotency of Descartes' philos- 
ophy, of Spinozism, of Comte's Positivism, 
of Spencer's Causal Evolutionism in the face 
of falsities and anarchism. The fierce light- 
ning of the reformer, the mild equable radi- 
ance of the lover they had not. Christianity 
alone has grappled with the grim and ag- 
gressive realities of the workaday world. 



110 The Religion of a Person. 

And in grappling with tliem it has achieved 
a succession of triumphs. Womanhood, 
childhood, manhood are subject to new ap- 
praisements since the incoming of Jesus 
Christ into the sphere of humankind. Plato, 
Aristotle, Socrates did not bring to pass new 
evaluations among men that wrought univer- 
sal reforms. Ethics rooted in impersonalism 
find voice in Plautus, the Eoman dramatist, 
**A mian is a wolf to a man whom he does 
not know;" in Aristotle, *^No man can prac- 
tice virtue who is living the life of a mechanic 
or laborer;" in Plato's Eepublic, which made 
the holding of wives in common, the keep- 
ing of children in ignorance of their real 
parents, and their upbringing by the State; 
in Hegesias' pessimism, ^^Life only appears 
a good thing to a fool; to a wise man it is 
indifferent. ' ' Life as a dilettanteism, a thing 
without serious purpose, a sensual indul- 
gence, is the perennial product of all thinking 
that does not root itself in the philosophy of 
Jesus Christ. He above all other men Kved 
tremendously. He saw life as a business of 
salvation, not of reprobation; as a privilege 
of time and of eternity. He was Himself in 



Righteousness. ill 

deadly earnest. His search for reality was 
not that of a coquetting amateur. He was 
not content with the moral and spiritual pa- 
ralysis which afflicted men whithersoever He 
turned His eve. He was Himself the embodi- 
ment of moral and spiritual health; to use 
His own word, *^I am the Life;'' *^I am come 
that they might have life, and that they 
might have it more abundantly." Out of the 
fullness of God He spoke. In the fullness of 
God He lived. Between His word and His 
work there was eternal agreement. Jesus 
appeared among men at a period when God 
was no longer believed. Those who essayed 
to teach religion Jesus characterized as blind 
leaders of the blind. 

These pseudo teachers were in Carlyle's 
phrase, ** Blindness laying down the Laws of 
Optics." They could but one end reach both 
for themselves and for their followers; 
namely, falling into the ditch. The Jesuitical 
jargon of these pretentious men, these spir- 
itual charlatans, found its fruitage in prac- 
tical falsities, in self-deceptions, in the 
cheapest of tinsel and mummery, in every 
conceivable personal vice. The mechanical, 



112 The Religion of a Person. 

materialistic doctrines of the first Cliristian 
century in tlieir antagonism of the Christian 
faith were not more persistent nor more per- 
nicious than the same doctrines of the seven- 
teenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth Christian 
centuries. John Locke, emphasizing in his 
body of thought the primacy of sensuous ex- 
perience ; David Hume, giving chieftaincy to 
the association of ideas gathered from the 
experience of the race; Herbert Spencer, 
affirming the parallelism of mind and matter 
— made of life and its vast issues a mere the- 
atricality, a paltry patchwork, a moral vacu- 
ity. The Christian religion has been in every 
thinkable aspect the world's savior, the 
world's redeemer, the world's benefactor. 
It has been the embodiment of straightness. 
It has been able to say to all men everywhere, 
*^This is the way; walk ye in it;'' **He that 
followeth Me shall not walk in darkness, but 
shall have the light of life ;" *^I am the "Way, 
the Truth, and the Life." Ethics rooted in 
personalism — in other words, in Jesus' mes- 
sage to men — stakes direct issue with Plautus 
as voicing Roman paganism; with Aristotle, 
with Plato, as voicing the refinements of 



Righteousness. 113 

Greek pMlosopliy; with the Stoicism of He- 
gesios, with the materialistic mummery of 
Judaism, with latter-day impersonalism. 
And history renders the verdict as to the 
outcome of the contest. The mightiest of per- 
sonalities have been Christian personalities. 
These personalities were lovers of God, were 
lovers of men. Righteously they thought. 
Righteously they wrought. 

In the fear of God, in the love of God, in 
the power of God they lived, they moved, 
they had their being. As related to their 
fellows, they heard and incarnated Jesus' 
word: **Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thy- 
self;" **A new commandment I give unto 
you, that ye love one another ; as I have loved 
you, that ye also love one another." The 
German philosopher Wundt gave fit expres- 
sion to the brotherhood of thought made real 
through Jesus Christ in the sentence, ^^The 
Christian Religion is always the point where 
the man who is debarred from all higher in- 
terests of intellectual culture can meet his 
fellow-men. ^ ' Similarly is it the point where 
political and social equality becomes an ex- 
perience in lieu of a fancy. Mr. James 
8 



114 The Religion of a Person. 

Bryce, the astute and profound British 
statesman, has said that the American type 
of democracy is the type toward which all 
others are inevitably tending. And the Amer- 
ican type of democracy is, in form at least, 
pre-eminently the Christian type. It is the 
democracy which announces an abiding con- 
fidence in the virtuous possibility of all men, 
thereby taking issue with the dictum of Aris- 
totle, **No man can practice virtue who is 
living the life of mechanic or laborer." In 
the progress of the principle of brotherhood 
in Jesus Christ the spurious separations of 
Greek aristocrat from Greek democrat, of 
Jewish Pharisee from Jewish publican, 
of Roman patrician from Roman plebeian, 
of German barons from German serfs, of 
French Monarchists from French Jacobins, 
of English nobility from English yeomanry 
have been brushed aside as webs of gossamer. 
Equality before the law is the slogan of all 
forward civilizations. Equality of opportu- 
nity is the slogan of all individual and com- 
munity development. Liberty in agreement 
with the common good, fraternity of disposi- 
tion toward each and all are likewise inspira- 



Righteousness. 115 

tional words of all progressive peoples of the 
earth. This form of democracy, which is but 
another phrasing of the brotherhood of the 
gospel of Jesus Christ, is eminently prac- 
tical and is making real continuously the 
felicity which the ancients fabled of Atlantis. 
This brotherhood is the acceptance of God's 
estimate of man. It is not the coinage of a 
diseased brain. It is sanity in all of its length 
and breadth. It is a refusal to estimate man 
in terms of physical force. It is a refusal to 
see in expressions of personality the subjec- 
tive side of conserved energy, of conserved 
matter. It is the affirmation that akin to God 
is man. It is the affirmation that man is 
God's child, is God's helper, is God's vice- 
gerent throughout all the earth. It is the 
affirmation that finite personality infinitely 
transcends all limitation of space and time; 
that the present is not sufficient for the com- 
plete finding of moral and spiritual gravity; 
that a determining, thinking, acting conscious 
self can not be encompassed by time spaces. 
Such an estimate of man announces the in- 
evitable decease of all philosophies which do 
not see in man the highest phenomenon. 



116 The Religion of a Person. 

Emerson's apostrophe is the Christian word: 
**The great Pan of old who was clothed in 
a leopard skin to signify the beantiful variety 
of things, and the firmament his coat of stars 
— ^was but the representative of thee, rich 
and various Man! thou palace of sight and 
sound carrjdng in thy senses the morning 
and the night and the unfathomable galaxy; 
in thy brain the g^eometry of the City of 
God ; in thy heart the bower of love and the 
realms of right and wrong.'' It is this eval- 
uation of man which descries in him the con- 
centration of the vast, the form of the form- 
less, the house of reason, the oave of memory, 
the ocean of love, the abyss of possibility. 
It is this evaluation which makes of the 
Christian religion the religion of the earth. 
No heathen system of philosophy appraises 
man as prophecy, as suggestion, as the form 
of the formless, as an abysmal possibility. 
Hence, the inevitable decadence of Buddhism, 
of Shintoism, of Confucianism, of Brahman- 
ism, of Moslemism, and all other bodies of 
thought that interpret man mechanically, 
sensuously, temporally, spatially. 

Christian democracy, Christian brother- 



Righteousness. 117 

hood is but another phrasing of the sons of 
men transformed into the sons of God. He 
who carries in his senses the morning, the 
night, the unfathomable galaxies of the em- 
pyraean; he who carries in his brain the ge- 
ometry of the City of God and in his heart 
the bower of love, the realms of right and 
wrong, is the translation of the Infinite in 
the terms of the finite. Miles of Atlantic 
brine, bounded only by lines of latitude and 
longitude, are wholly meaningless in them- 
selves, but they are of unspeakable value 
when they wash the shores whereon dwells 
humankind. Truth, love, justice, freedom, 
faith as principles of being have in them- 
selves no worth, but are filled with expres- 
sion when immanent and efficient in finite per- 
sonality. This immanence and this efficiency 
possible, if not actual, is the perennial thesis 
of Christianity. 

Had Count Cavour, the Italian statesman, 
rightly esteemed the miracle-working of the 
Christian faith, he would not have given ut- 
terance to the following apprehension: ^^ So- 
ciety is marching with long strides toward 
democracy. . . . Is it a good I Is it an evil? 



118 The Religion of a Person. 

I know little enough, but it is, in my opinion, 
the inevitable future of humanity. '' 

No fears need be entertained by states- 
man, by scientist, by industrial captain, by 
thinker or worker in any parallel as to the 
outcome of human society if the high worth 
set to man by Paul, by John, by Matthew, by 
Simon Peter, by Augustine, by Telemachus, 
by William Carey, by Robert Morrison, by 
Phillips Brooks finds acceptance and appli- 
cation. These great discemers of spirits, 
these dynamic personalities revoiced and re- 
enacted the message and ministry of Jesus, 
the Christ of God. The persistent and per- 
nicious prejudgment which would erect insu- 
perable barriers between votaries of diverse 
faiths, between civilizations Oriental and Oc- 
cidental, finds genesis and continuity in im- 
personal thought. Life interpreted in terms 
personal discerns evermore the predominance 
of a universal nature. Such an interpreta- 
tion espies the divine nature in latency, if not 
patent, in the Senegambian, in the Indian 
Parsee, in the Muscovite peasant, in the Bur- 
man pauper as truly as it is espied in the 
American collegian, the German philosopher, 



Righteousness. 119 

the Italian artist. The possible man is the 
real plenum, annulling all suggestions of de- 
grees positive and comparative. This was 
the vision, the interpretation of human pos- 
sibility possessed by John the Evangelist: 
** Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and 
it doth not yet appear what we shall be: 
but we know that when He shall appear, we 
shall be like Him; for we shall see Him as 
He is." 

Kipling after years of residence among 
the most exclusive of all peoples, the Hin- 
doos, gave his unmeasured assent to the 
brotherhood of the Christian faith in the 
stanza : 

"O, the East is East, and the West is West; 

And never the twain shall meet. 
Till earth and sky stand presently 

Before God's judgment seat. 
But there is neither East nor West, 

Nor border, nor breed, nor birth 
When two strong men stand face to face. 
Though they come from the ends of the earth.'* 

The field marshal of the early Christian 
hosts, the Apostle Paul, in the light of historic 
evolution, spoke the colossal word, the uni- 



120 The Religion of a Person. 

versa! word, when lie declared, **Tlie King- 
dom of God is not meat and drink [not inter- 
pretable in sensuons terms] ; bnt rigliteons- 
ness ... in the Holy Ghost." Adherence 
to this Kingdom is adherence to a personal 
philosophy. Believing in this Kingdom, we 
believe in the supremacy of God, in the imma- 
nent, transcendent God, in Jesns Christ the 
fullness of the Godhead bodily. Believing 
in this Kingdom, we rightly esteem ourselves 
and our fellows as workers together with God 
for the inbringing of ^^ whatsoever things are 
true, whatsoever things are honest, whatso- 
ever things are just, whatsoever things are 
pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatso- 
ever things are of good report." 



Chapter IV. 
FREEDOM. 



Looking at the truths of geometry, the laws of 
nature, and the beauty and organization of the visible 
world, it is as impossible rationally to suppose that 
they arose by chance, or by mere continuous jostling, 
as it is to suppose that a work of literature or a piece 
of music was composed in that way. 

—SIR OLIVER LODGE. 

Every action of the human free will is a miracle to 
physical and chemiceil and mathematical science. 

—LORD KELVIN. 



FEEEDOM. 

I. 

Feeedom is presupposed in every sphere 
of thought and action. It is implicit in the 
assumption of responsibility, both individual 
and social. It is the basis of all personal and 
rational life. Punch and Judy exhibitions, 
kaleidoscopic transitions, the gyrations of 
puppets on a string can not be substituted for 
personal and rational achievement through 
the verbal jugglery of a mechanical philos- 
ophy. 

The consciousness which provides a stage 
for the parade of mere machine-like impulses 
is in reality no consciousness. Mr. Huxley's 
famous proposition would be the extinction 
of personality: ^^I protest that if some great 
Power would agree to make me think always 
what is true, and do what is right, on condi- 
tion of being turned into a sort of clock and 
wound up every morning, I should instantly 
close with the offer. ' ' All life would become 

123 



124 The Religion of a Person. 

a meaningless automatism if meclianically 
directed. No virtue could possibly inhere in 
an automatic brain, in an automatic con- 
science. A rational world would be the 
emptiest of dreams if Mr. Huxley's wound-up 
machine was the summing-up of finite per- 
sonality. True thinking and right doing are 
word-plays foreign to the self-determinations 
of the thinker and doer. All character is the 
result of choice. Nothing of coherency is 
possible in a machine man. Time does not 
cohere, facts do not cohere, his fellows do 
not cohere. Everything falls apart. Eeason 
and rightness become debris. The notion of 
freedom is implicit in the structure of reason 
itself. It is asserted as truly in the inward- 
ness of our mental activity as it is in our 
moral activity. The practical function of 
self-control is universally acknowledged. It 
is the every-day experience of every man 
that he thinks twice, indeed indefinitely, upon 
the same subject; that he returns to argu- 
ments after dismissing them; that with ease 
and frequency he tears asunder the plausible 
and misleading conjunctions of habit and as- 
sociation, and reserves his decision until the 



Freedom. 125 

clarified connections of reason are readied. 
The whole maiss of material, mental, and 
moral phenomena we make the object of onr 
free thought. It is only by so doing that 
we save onrselves from the fluctuations of 
fortune, from the caprice of circumstance, 
from pithless performance. Life indeed 
would find its physical parallel in a ship 
aground, battered by huge and angry waves, 
were it not for the faculty of rational self- 
control. Eliminate this faculty, and there is 
for us no escape possible from the Iliad of 
woes, from perpetual outer darkness, from 
cataclysms intellectual and ethical. An in- 
telligence that is not free does not advance 
beyond a barren abstraction. It descries 
nothing more than a perennial pantomime, a 
merriment-making mimicry, a Greek tragedy 
with the deus ex machina behind the scenes 
throughout the wide range of the universe. 
Mechanical forces endowed with conscious- 
ness find no place in the structure of rational 
living. To think twice, thrice upon the same 
subject, to reserve our conclusion until all 
facts are analyzed, contradict the notion of 
consciously endowed mechanical forces. De- 



126 The Religion of a Person. 

spite Greek Atomism, Frencli Positivism, 
English Causal Evolutionism, and all other 
forms of mechanical philosophy, reason as- 
serts itself as a self-directing force in the 
whole of living. Indeed, to dispute freedom 
of thought is to assume it, since the denial 
itself is the affirmation of unfettered think- 
ing. 

A modern philosopher of highest repute, 
Professor B. P. Bowne, writes: ^*If we were 
looking for the most important field of free- 
dom we should certainly find it in the moral 
realm ; but if we were seeking for the purest 
illustration of freedom, we should find it in 
the operations of pure thought. Here we 
have a self-directing activity which proceeds 
according to laws inherent in itself and to 
ideals generated by itself." 

In our periods of non-reflection we seem 
to be under the dominance of an iron neces- 
sity. The phenomenal world has the appear- 
ance of adamantine fixedness. Limitations 
are on every side. Our life seems exposed to 
the contempt or to the charity of coming 
events. Our fingers are inefficient in the un- 
raveling of Penelope's web. Our brains 



Freedom. 127 

stand appalled before the historical Sphinx. 
Our swords are dull of edge in our attacks 
upon the Hydra-headed circumstance. Ne- 
cessity with the facial terrors of a Medusa 
freezes our blood, and we are motionless be- 
fore the fact of life. But these periods of 
non-reflection are periods of self -inactivity ; 
the negation of self-direction. 

11. 

The first and last duty of philosophy is 
not to fashion abstract theories, not to revel 
in syllogistic argument, but to formulate and 
understand our personal life. This formula- 
tion and this understanding must be in per- 
sonal terms. To talk of life as ^*a definite, 
coherent heterogeneity" finding its genesis 
in '*an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity;'' 
as **an integration of matter,'' **a dissipa- 
tion of motion;" as the work of sensations, 
of customs, or any form of impersonalism — ^is 
the conclusion of inaccurate thinking. It is 
the stupidity of Homer's Ajax philosophic- 
ally expressed. Matter, motion, sensations, 
accumulated conventions, forces innumerable 
are mere abstractions separate from personal 



128 The Religion of a Person. 

experience, and to introduce an abstraction 
as the explanation of the experience which 
gives it validity is contradictory thinking. It 
is not denied that we live in a world in which 
thought-laws are immanent. They are not 
our creation. They represent absolute fixi- 
ties of mental procedure. Being, identity, 
causality, quantity, space, time, quality, mo- 
tion, number, necessity, purpose, possibility, 
are norms by which the mind proceeds im- 
plicitly and explicitly in fixing, defining, and 
relating its objects. They are principles fun- 
damental in rational action. They are the 
contents of pure reason ; the will of God con- 
cerning us in the realm of thought, the con- 
stants of the mental equation. Every act of 
thinking, however simple, involves these reg- 
ulative ideas. We can not legislate concern- 
ing these mental constants. It is mental de- 
struction for us to attempt their abrogation. 
But while secure from all tampering and 
overthrow, and existing in their own divine 
right, they do not of themselves secure obe- 
dience. They demand the ratification of the 
free spirit. This uniformity is not the an- 
tithesis of freedom. It is the vital union of 



Freedom. 129 

personality and law; it is reality disclosing 
itself in opposite aspects. Nothing of pre- 
existenee or of substantiality may be affirmed 
of these mental norms. They live, move, and 
have their being as organic principles in the 
building np of personal experience. Inde- 
pendent of the free thinker they have no 
efficiency whatsoever. Mechanical philoso- 
phy blunders in assigning a causality to these 
principles. It insists, because of their im- 
manence and of their uniformity, on their 
self-sufficiency. It makes of the personal 
thinking subject the compound, the subjective 
aspect of the impersonal, unthinking prin- 
ciple. Mr. Spencer in his ^^ Principles of 
Psychology" champions the all-sufficiency of 
impersonalism in his avowal; ''Psychical 
changes either conform to law or they do not. 
If they do not conform to law, this work in 
common with all works on the subject is 
sheer nonsense. If they do conform to law, 
there can not be any such thing as free will." 
That psychical changes as truly as physical 
changes are subject to law, sane thinking does 
not deny; but to affirm that subjection to law 
destroys free will, is but another way of say- 
9 



130 The Religion of a Person. 

ing that tlie principles whicli underlie articu- 
late mental experience, the constants of the 
mental equation wholly control and direct the 
conscious, thinking self. This is the pre- 
eminence of impersonalism. Mr. Spencer in 
his observation identifies freedom with law- 
lessness, and confuses necessity with a will- 
ing conformity to law, as evidenced in the 
statement, ^^If the psychical changes (in ac- 
curate speech, the psychical agents) do not 
conform to law, this work in common with 
all works on the subject is sheer nonsense." 
Mechanical philosophy, of which Mr. Spencer 
is a distinguished exponent, makes all self- 
direction incompatible with the uniformity of 
law. This confusion comes through the in- 
vestment of abstractions with an abiding and 
efficient causality. The laws of thought, how- 
ever, despite their uniformity, do not insure 
right thinking without the self-control of the 
free spirit. There is no self-control exclu- 
sive of thought-laws, and there is no effective 
rationality without self-control. A self-in- 
closed continuity of the thought principles is 
a fiction pure and simple, as all practical ex- 
perience discloses. 



Freedom. 131 

Our freedom is found in our use of all 
law, and all law becomes valid in the exercise 
of our freedom. In lieu of being a self-suffi- 
cient, rigid fixity, we perennially discover all 
law through our rational determinations to 
be pliable to our every aim, obedient to our 
every will. Indeed, law is the absolute pre- 
supposition of our having any freedom or 
rational life whatever. It founds our control 
of nature. 

Lord Kelvin, Sir Isaac Newton, Henry 
Bessemer, Cyrus McCormick, Eobert Fulton, 
Elias Howe would have been as impotent as 
babes in their attempt to interpret the phys- 
ical world, if the principles being, causality, 
identity, motion, space, number, etc., were 
not unvarying in their operation. The sta- 
bility of these principles bestows the function 
upon the Baldwin Locomotive Works of con- 
structing a mighty mechanism of refined 
steel, whose exploits under human direction 
transcend the most winged fancies of Greek 
melodists. 

All industry, all commerce, all govern- 
ment, all art, all religion, root themselves 
through human agency in the uniformity of 



132 The Religion of a Person. 

law. That seedtime is succeeded by harvest, 
that light excludes darkness, that food nour- 
ishes, that fire purifies, that water evapo- 
rates, that ^Hruth crushed to earth shall rise 
again," that 3 plus 6 times 4 equals 36, that 
the Kingdom of God is not in word, but in 
power — can have but one influence upon hu- 
man personality, and that is to quicken and 
incite the exercise of an enthusiastic freedom. 
We are strong on the terms of freedom. In 
so far as our faculties enter into marriage 
with' these regulative ideas, to that degree 
in which we take up the uniformities of 
thought into ourselves do we dominate the 
world into which we have been divinely 
thrust. Co-operation with law is the greatest 
possible extension of our powers. It is the 
addition to us of hands, of feet, of eyes, of 
brain cells, of good rich blood, of days, of 
knowledge, of purity, of abiding, regenerat- 
ing efficiency. The fifteenth century con- 
tained many men who saw in the sphere a 
problem for closet geometry. They consumed 
themselves in the contemplation of angles, 
quadrants, tangents, parallelograms, circles, 
radii. In these they saw an end. They were 



Freedom. 133 

abstractionists. They made of themselves 
the servants of mental norms. 

But Christopher Columbus saw the 
earthly sphere not only as a problem for the 
closet geometrician, but also as a problem for 
the practical navigator. He duly appraised 
angles, quadrants, tangents, parallelograms, 
circles, radii. He only saw in them a means, 
not an end. Himself he saw as thinker and 
doer, and the only conceivable validity for 
geometrical science, according to his clear vi- 
sion, was to make it practical. The result 
of his co-operation with, his utilization of 
the contents of pure reason was the bursting 
forth of the splendors of a new world. The 
shrewd merchant, capitalist, industrial chief- 
tain is appreciative of law as the presuppo- 
sition of his rational freedom. Wealth he 
sees to be a mental efficiency, a coincidence 
with the principles underlying all mental ar- 
ticulation. He is sensible of the fact that 
sublime laws divinely enacted and divinely 
enforced play indifferently through atoms 
and galaxies, that petty economies s^Tubolize 
the greatest economies, that the principles 
immanent in the construction of a peasant's 



134 The Religion of a Person. 

hut tally witli tlie principles of tlie solar sys- 
tem. Law, lie affirms, in agreement with the 
philosopher, in and of itself is a barren tau- 
tology, but an invincible and beneficent fact 
under the determinations of reason. Within 
the precincts of his counting-room the laws 
of the universe are daily expounded. He sees 
in the crass principles quantity, quality, num- 
ber, symbols of the souPs economy. To seek 
the abrogation of these principles eventuates 
in his soul's undoing. And as a wise man 
he aligns himself with every rational neces- 
sity of thought, knowing that in such an align- 
ment he is becoming at one with God. Law 
in itself is a conception empty of all positive 
content. Law under the control and direction 
of free selfhood is human efficiency in its 
highest estate; it is the thought of God re- 
alized within the limitations of the finite. 

III. 

The logic of selfhood is the affirmation of 
freedom. * * The deepest consciousness of our 
own being is the sense of a free personality,'' 
says Fitch ett in his ** Unrealized Logic of Ee- 
ligion." If we are not men and women of 



Freedom. 135 

free determination, then are we the dupes, 
and not the masters and mistresses, of the 
phenomenal world. The blunt conclusion of 
Dr. Samuel Johnson uttered to his boon com- 
panion, Boswell, is the voice of all rational- 
ized living: *^Sir, we know our will is free, 
and there 's the end of it. As to the doctrine 
of necessity, no man believes it." Either 
mechanism or purposive causality accounts 
for life. But confronted by all propositions 
involving government, invention, social devel- 
opment, personal responsibility, mechanism 
is utterly impotent. The social common- 
wealth has been in all periods enriched solely 
by the free action of men who have burst 
asunder the invidious bars of birth and cir- 
cumstance and made all chaos pass under the 
fire of their thought. Disorders which threat- 
ened extermination of the social body, they 
have through the force of their free person- 
ality converted into wholesome elements. 

Their eyes were open to the unity in all 
things, to the omnipresence of a beneficent 
law, to the knowledge that the wise and obe- 
dient soul is strong with the strength of God. 
And the social commonwealth has found itself 



136 The Religion of a Person. 

imp over! slied in exceeding degree througH 
the misdirection of human freedom. Such 
perverters of individual prerogative are the 
pests of society. They overlook the possi- 
bilities of their own natures. They interpret 
themselves as groveling actualities. They 
do not see in each individual man a potential 
new-bom bard of the Holy Ghost. The power 
to love, to choose, to serve, to worship is our 
personal exaltation. It is the ray of divinity 
in man. This power alone is the star that 
suffers us not to lose our way in the dark and 
devious passages of life's journey. The over- 
throw of the man is effected when he is de- 
prived of the power of choice, when he is 
made an insensate cog, a non-volitional pin, 
a thoughtless wheel in the universal machine. 
Schopenhauer's insistence on the positive 
irrationality of all life is the degradation of 
all life. Strauss 's *^ enormous machine'' 
world with its pitiless wheels and thundering 
hammers converts all character into charla- 
tanry, and every conceivable substance of 
being into the veriest semblance. A non-per- 
sonal, a non-rational, a non-acting interpre- 
tation of thought and experience is a defer- 



Freedom. 137 

ence to Chaos, to Nothing, to Falsehood. It 
is not the utterance of a manly soul. It is not 
a tribute to God, the Vast Affirmative of all 
being, the All-Fair, the All-Grood, the world's 
Light and Love. 

The doctrine that men are but pawns and 
nine-pins finds no place of standing except in 
the world of theory. Historically it is rank 
and smells to heaven. The doctrinaireism of 
the French Enlightenment was its specula- 
tive utterance, and the charnal-house horrors 
of the French Revolution were its practical 
issues. A denial of finite freedom negates 
the synthetic unity of selfhood. It places the 
causal principle of finite activity within the 
series of phenomena. It makes of the think- 
ing, determining, conscious man the under 
side of the phenomenal world. It finds a pro- 
tagonist in the materialist Lamettrie, in his 
**L'Homme Machine," who reduced man to 
a mere automaton, a body governed by 
purely physical and necessary laws, a con- 
scious life composed entirely of sensations 
which are directly dependent on bodily proc- 
esses. It also finds a voice in the Spencerian 
Evolutionism, which makes the square of the 



138 The Religion of a Person. 

hypotenuse the equal of the sum of the 
squares of the other two sides of the triangle, 
which makes the economic policy of the Ger- 
man Empire the necessary resultants of con- 
flicting nascent motor excitations. Such doc- 
trines are reeds that pierce the hand when 
tested in the workaday world. Eeality is the 
rock on which they split. Hume's conception 
that the human mind is nothing more than 
the phenomenal world dissolved into a host 
of unrelated feelings or sensations, and by 
some logical black art summed together, is 
suicidal. In the very structure of the ra- 
tional life there must be a relating activity 
which is not itself a sensation to work upon 
the material of sense, before feelings are dis- 
tinguishable, and form a true experience. If 
sensations are the sole reality, the question 
at once arises. How can the sensation of cold 
distinguish itself from the sensation of heat, 
the sense of blindness differentiate itself 
from the sense of sight? The superlative 
worth of Immanuel Kant's philosophy for 
all thought and experience may be summed 
up in the sentence : it is not nature which im- 
poses its necessity on us, but it is we who 



Freedom. 139 

give laws to nature. Freedom is tlius the 
absolute pre-condition of all rational and 
moral worth. The true conception of finite 
freedom is that man is not a phenomenon of 
nature, a hand, a foot, an ear, a tongue, a 
stomach, a nerve vesicle, an ignominious sub- 
altern, but a stupendous antagonism, a tre- 
mendous efficiency, a dragging together of 
the poles of the universe. In him there is 
latent and potent the lightning which ex- 
plodes and fashions planets, which upheaves 
-^tnas and Vesuviuses, which sets in vibra- 
tion electric and atmospheric atoms, which 
robs the midnight of its blaclmess and rivals 
the splendors of a meridian sun. It is his 
rational freedom which metamorphoses sand- 
stone and granite, iron ore and Michigan 
forests into New Yorks, Berlins, Cunard Line 
steamships, and Boston subways. 

The free self is the true composer and de- 
composer of nature. There is no chemical 
element in fruit or flower, no physical prop- 
erty in moutain range or stellar galaxy, no 
mechanical force in whirling propellers or 
heated cylinder box that his free thought does 
not command. His faculties are his wealth. 



140 The Religion of a Person. 

Through them he iinites himself with all 
thought and with all things. His affinities re- 
late him to the universe and to God, its 
Maker. It is his determining genius which 
plants the rose of beauty on the brow of 
chaos, and discloses the central intention of 
all nature to be harmony and joy. It is per- 
sonality initiating which holds all life in per- 
fect solution, which compels every atom to 
serve a universal end. It is man affirming 
himself which makes real the poetic word : 

"All is waste and worthless, till 
Arrives the wise selecting will. 
And out of slime and chaos, Wit 
Draws the threads of fair and fit: 
Then temples rose, and towns, and marts. 
The shop of toil, the hall of arts; 
Then flew the sail across the seas 
To feed the North from tropic trees; 
The storm wind wove, the torrent span 
Where they were bid the rivers ran; 
New slaves fulfilled the poet's dream, 
Galvanic wire, strong-shouldered steam; 
Then docks were built, and crops were stored 
And ingots added to the hoard." 

Freedom is the step from knowledge to 
achievement. It is the step from the *^ chalk 



Freedom. 141 

circle of imbecility" into fruitfulness. It is 
tlie step from the verbal world into the world 
of serviceable action. It is the step which 
gives flesh and blood reality to intuition, which 
unites in bonds indissoluble the man within 
and the world without. Lacking this, we lack 
all. Having this, we have all. A keen critic 
observes: ^^One of the high anecdotes of the 
world is the reply of Newton to the inquiry, 
how he had been able to achieve his discov- 
eries, *By always intending my mind.' " 

The age of Pericles, the fifth century be- 
fore the Christian era, was the golden period 
of Grecian art, of Grecian literature, of 
Grecian politics. Of these halcyon and ple- 
nipotent decades of Greek civilization one 
pre-eminent cause may be assigned : the con- 
centrated energies of Pericles. Plutarch 
tells us : ^* There was in Athens but one street 
in which Pericles was ever seen, the street 
which led to the market-place and the council 
house. He declined all invitations to ban- 
quets and all gay assemblies and company. 
During the whole period of his administra- 
tion, encompassing forty years, he never 
dined at the table of a friend.'' These illus- 



142 The Religion of a Person. 

trious characters collected and swung their 
whole being into each successive act. Their 
eyes created vast mental estates as fast as 
the sun breeds clouds. With them freedom 
was a plus condition of mind, of heart, of 
body, which wrought while others merely 
thought. Forces in league with all truth, 
with all character, with all achievement were 
lodged within their active brains. Every 
individual man is bom to be rich. This birth- 
right is not primarily material riches, but 
riches mental and moral. Through his self- 
determination he avails himself of all men's 
faculties. They are his legitimate men- 
servants and maid-servants. At his beck and 
call they come and go. Degrees of latitude, 
Greek Olympiads, Egyptian years are thrust 
aside in his communion with Virgil, Horace, 
Plato, Kant, Homer, Dante, Milton. Time 
and space are no more when the pure and 
aspiring mind walks abroad. All thoughts 
and things domesticate themselves in such a 
mind. In Socrates, in Moses, in Zoroaster, 
in Archimedes it discerns no antiquity. In 
Gothic cathedrals, in the Muse of Hellas, in 
England, in America, the acquisitive mind. 



Freedom. 143 

the energetic mind descries itself in perspec- 
tive. 

IV. 

Freedom finds its chief function in the 
realm of morals. It is the central factor of 
personality, the condition of responsibility, 
the basis of the moral life. The notion of a 
bound will is repudiated by legitimate think- 
ing and responsible action. Merit and de- 
merit are perennial implications of the moral 
consciousness and the ceaseless resultants of 
the determining, acting self. All fatalistic 
schemes of ethics are embarrassed immeas- 
urably by the inevitable notion of account- 
ability. Formal denials of freedom have 
never found a cordiality of reception in the 
practical spheres of endeavor. Only under 
the shelter of phrases which seemed to retain 
freedom, while in reality denying it, has the 
doctrine of moral necessity found a place of 
abode. All pantheistic philosophies con- 
founding finite error, folly, and sin with the 
ever-presence of the divine wisdom and work ; 
all causal evolutionism paying homage to the 
materialistic trinity, matter, force, and mo- 



144 The Religion of a Person. 

tion, and yet announcing itself as the coad- 
jutor of religion ; all theological vagaries that 
degrade finite freedom in their undue empha- 
sis of the divine absoluteness; all pseudo- 
Christian Science, all quasi-New Thought, to- 
gether with all aspects of religious doctrine 
which give primacy to nebulous emotions — 
are the shadows of a great rock in a weary 
land to the doctrine of moral necessity. They 
make of our free personality a mere parallel- 
ogram of forces, a Punch-and-Judy exhibi- 
tion in which there is an infinite deal of chat- 
ter and appearance of strenuous action, but 
nothing more. Life cognitive, life emotional, 
life volitional, rejects the notion of antece- 
dent forces such as heredity, custom, envi- 
ronment, laws immanent in the physical, 
mental, and moral structure, having as their 
resultant the vices of a Catiline or the vir- 
tues of a Cicero. The sin of the sinner, the 
integrity of the saint, the peccadilloes of a 
Horace Walpole, the wisdom of an Edmund 
Burke are the resultants primarily of the free 
self directing or misdirecting its powers. 
The measure of merit or demerit can not by 
any logical legerdemain be predicated of an 
automaton. 



Freedom. 145 

It is the free man moralized who guaran- 
tees all social existence and development. 
Every institution, religious, educational, re- 
formatory, philanthropic, and penal, is the 
present visible boundary line of an unfet- 
tered reason, an unfettered conscience. They 
are the normal expressions of the rational 
man, the determining man, the aspiring man. 
They are the ethical energies affirming their 
proper force. They are our alignment with 
all health of body, mind, and spirit. It is 
the non-reflective mind which looks upon in- 
stitutions as aboriginal, which declares the 
man to be the product of crystallized conven- 
tions. It is to the young citizen, to the in- 
complete thinker that society organically ex- 
pressed appears in rigid repose, in arbitrary 
action. But to the wise man, to the man of 
action, society is fluid to thought, is plastic 
to touch. It has no roots nor centers exclu- 
sive of the morally determining man. Around 
his will all things gyrate. As opposed to his 
purpose, legislation, whether enacted by 
Draco, Lycurgus, Justinian, or Nicholas I, is 
a rope of sand which perishes in the twist- 
ing. The State in its multifarious ramifica- 

10 



146 The Religion of a Person. 

tions is the follower, never tlie leader of per- 
sonality. All history is the sketching in 
coarse outline of moral perception. 

What there is of ethical worth in the Brit- 
ish Empire is the immediate product of Earl 
of Chatham, of Henry Canning, of William 
E. Gladstone, of the Seventh Earl of Shaftes- 
bury, of John Wesley, and of men of like 
quality. America's moral greatness finds its 
genesis and propagation in characters like 
unto Washington, Lincoln, Samuel Adams, 
Matthew Simpson, Charles W. Eliot, Phillips 
Brooks. 

All laws, all institutions are but the mem- 
oranda of the man. Any man or body of 
men bent on the common good easily con- 
founds the arithmetic of statists and achieves 
extravagant ends out of all proportion to 
their visible means. 

Martin Luther threw into irretrievable 
confusion the combined energies of the papal 
Church, the most potent hierarchy of ancient 
or modem times. He was the brawny Antaeus 
of men's rights, no less than veritable priest 
of the Most High God. He knew and made 
real the knowledge that all freedom, all cul- 



Freedom. 147 

ture, all intercourse, all energ}", have as their 
end the coronation of character. In the good 
man he saw the epitome of the Church, the 
State, of all conceivable society. Shabby imi- 
tations, indeed, of abiding moral worth were 
the Holy Eoman Empire, the French Mon- 
archy, the ecclesiasticism of Innocent III and 
Leo X. The man of moral determinations is 
the true reformer. He effects salutary 
changes without army, fort, navy, wealth, or 
prestige. Each and every man is sensible of 
Ms presence and power. He penetrates all 
armors, pierces to every center, and discerns 
the secret of all his fellows. His relation to 
men is angelic. And with no less of verity 
it is gladiatorial. He communicates to all 
minds, to all hearts the infinite thought and 
love. He likewise makes known to all minds 
and hearts the infinite antagonisms. He is 
God's presence superseding every fatuous 
proxy. The richness of his nature makes 
possible his entrance into easy and fixed re- 
lations with aspiring and achieving souls 
everywhere. He is the despiser of all char- 
latanry, whether in saint or sage. He is the 
lover of all sincerity, whether in publican or 



148 The Religion of a Person. 

sinner. Such a man is the veritable incarna- 
tion of God's wisdom and will. In him the 
divine circulations never rest nor linger. 
Every moment instructs, likewise every ob- 
ject. He is indeed and in truth nature vola- 
tile, nature precipitated, nature crystallized, 
nature vegetative. He is the channel for the 
parts of God's wide world and for the sum 
of God 's wide world. In him the whole scale 
of being, from the center to the poles, is trav- 
ersed. He is an ever-present reality, and yet 
he is a referred existence. He crowds eter- 
nity into an hour and stretches an hour to 
eternity. He is a vast performance. He is 
a vast promise. His secret he publishes to 
a listening world, but it admits of no rash 
explanation. The orbit of his thought and 
efficiency vaults like the rainbow into the 
deep, but no audacious wing of archangel or 
of man is strong enough to follow it and re- 
port the return of the curve. His every in- 
tent is seconded and is disposed to greater 
conclusions than he designed. Such is the 
significance of moral determination. Such 
is the true appraisement of all personality 
that rightly wields its freedom. Personality 



Freedom. 149 

free and efficient was incalculably esteemed 
in the thought and plan of Jesus the Incar- 
nate Son of God. He did not essay the estab- 
lishment of His Eangdom separate from the 
moral freedom of men. His words : ** Repent 
ye ; for the Kingdom of heaven is at hand ; ' ' 
**Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His 
righteousness ;"* 'Follow Me, and I will make 
you fishers of men;" **Go ye and teach all 
nations, baptizing them in the name of the 
Father and of the Son and of the Holy 
Ghost," are specific avowals of the freedom 
of finite personality. Automata are not the 
objective of the divine purpose as revealed 
in Jesus Christ. Free men with the myste- 
riously endowed capacity to frustrate, par- 
tially at least. Infinite wisdom and work are 
the objective of the Incarnation. To win 
these free men evoked the divine condescen- 
sion, the divine passion, the divine sacrifice. 
The freedom of man is the secret of his 
worth. Christianity is the historic publica- 
tion of this secret. The non-Christian reli- 
gions conceive of man in terms mechanical. 
He is the sport of loosened winds, of fire- 
breathing dragons, of blood-thirsty spirits. 



150 The Religion of a Person 

Of human worth, of human destiny they walk 
in gross darkness. Their thought oscillates 
between the present dreary round of exist- 
ence and the hope-abandoned future. But the 
religion of Jesus Christ affirms human free- 
dom, and in this affirmation is involved hu- 
man worth and human destiny. The self- 
determining man gives no place in his thought 
to unleashed winds, to fire-spouting dragons, 
to sanguinary spirits. He is the object of 
God's purpose. He is in God's heart, locked 
in the tenderest embrace. He is in his Fa- 
ther's house. His present, therefore, is in- 
finite in its possibilities, and he knows that 
the future can not be otherwise. He is con- 
scious of a heavenly escort throughout all 
joumeyings and of a beneficent purpose ly- 
ing in wait everywhither. He is God's co- 
worker, and his destiny, therefore, involves 
God's integrity. He is the beneficiary of all 
compensations. He is God's perfect balance. 
This was the meaning of the Pauline word: 
**We know that all things work together for 
good to them that love God;" '*A11 things 
are yours, and ye are Christ's, and Christ 
is God's." 



Chapter V. 
HUMILITY. 



I believe the first test o£ a truly great man is his 
humility. I do not mean by humility doubt of his own 
power, or hesitation in speaking of his opinions; but a 
right understanding of the relation between what he 
can do and say and the rest of the world's sayings 
and doings. All great men not only know their busi- 
ness, but usually know that they know it; and are not 
only right in their main opinions, but they usually know 
that they are right in them; only they do not think 
much of themselves on that account. Arnolfo knows 
he can build a good dome at Florence; Albert Durer 
writes calmly to one who had found fault with his work, 
"It can not be better done." Sir Isaac Newton knows 
that he has worked out a problem or two that would 
have puzzled anybody else — only they do not expect 
their fellow-men, therefore, to fall down and worship 
them; they have a curious undersense of powerless- 
ness, feeling that the greatness is not in them, but 
through them; that they could not do or be anything 
else than God made them. And they see something 
divine and God-made in every other man they meet, 
and are endlessly, foolishly, and incredibly merciful. 

—JOHN RUSKIN. 



HUMILITY. 

I. 

The spirit of humility is not tlie spirit 
of poltroonery. In no sense does it indicate 
an infirmity of mind or heart. Eather is it 
the initial step toward the upper ranges of 
individual life, the beginning of a vital mem- 
bership in the social body, the condition of 
all attainment in realms ethical and spiritual. 
In the Kingdom of God humility is a dynamic 
principle. *' Before honor is humility;" 
** Better it is to be of an humble spirit with 
the lowly than to divide the spoil with the 
proud;" ^* Pride goeth before destruction, 
and an haughty spirit before a fall;" ^* "Who- 
soever exalteth himself shall be abased; and 
he that humbleth himself shall be exalted;" 
'*Be clothed with humility, for God resisteth 
the proud and giveth grace to the humble;" 
*^ Humble yourselves, therefore, under the 
mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you 
in due time." 

153 



154 The Religion of a Person. 

Thus speak the sages of Israel, the apos- 
tles of the Christian faith, and the Incarnate 
Son of God. And their word is the word of 
legitimate thinking and sensible living. In 
colossal cipher did these mighty men of old 
transcribe their thought and in speech as 
universal as the wind did they speak. It is 
a most patent and potent fact that all achieve- 
ment, whether designated as profane or sa- 
cred, involves the dynamic quality of humil- 
ity. The self-centered man is foredoomed to 
failure. He is at odds with the order of life. 
He can not outwit the regime of the universe. 
The teacher must first be a learner, the ruler 
first a servant, the master workman first an 
apprentice. Tragedies in fact, more plaintive 
and plentiful than those wrought in fancy 
by Medusa the Gorgon, marks the history of 
individuals and nations because of their un- 
willingness to seek self -advancement through 
the medium of self-abasement. Mischief 
afoot, a letting-slip of the dogs of war, a 
veritable congregation of pestilent vapors, 
is the spirit of self-assertiveness. Whether 
in commerce, in government, in education, in 
art, in religion the ascendency of the egoistic 



Humility. 155 

impulse is pregnant with permanent peril. 
Moumfnl eaims in all climes and in all cen- 
turies announce disaster to souls potentially 
great by virtue of their slight of the self -re- 
nouncing principle. 

Self-subordination is our appreciation of 
the common good. It is our announcement 
that the well-being of ourselves is only pro- 
moted by the well-being of our fellows. It 
is our belief in the intuitive truth, the whole 
is greater than any of its parts. The frus- 
tration of the life-plans of so great a genius 
as Napoleon the First is interpretable on the 
ground solely of his disdain for universal 
well-being. He allowed no function to con- 
science in his conception of life. He permit- 
ted the widest range to his senses. His 
worldly-mindedness was of the kind that dis- 
pensed with God. Within the compass of his 
sensuous nature the major part of his char- 
acter found voice and practical expression. 
He esteemed his physical passions a finality. 
His proverbs were the winkings of a base 
prudence : ^*Men are moved by self-interest;" 
** Friendship is but a name;'* ^^Love is a silly 
infatuation;'' '*6od is on the side of the 



156 The Religion of a Person. 

strongest battalions.'^ Napoleon clutclied at 
sensual sweetness before it ripened on the 
slow tree of cause and effect. His ethical per- 
ceptions were loose and imperfect. An acute 
interpreter has observed, *^It is vinegar to 
the eyes to deal with men of loose and im- 
perfect moral perceptions.'' This observa- 
tion was most certainly confirmed by Sir 
William Pitt, England's premier; by John 
Adams, the American minister to the French 
court, and by Frederick William III, King of 
Prussia, in their intercourse with Napoleon. 
The great Corsican in his self-opinionation 
made himself the political and social center 
of the world's gravity. He took cognizance 
of no other man. In his conceit the British 
Empire, the Spanish Kingdom, the Eussian 
Monarchy, the Federation of German States, 
Prussia, Italy, and all other European na- 
tions were mere puppets whose gyrations 
were dependent on his will. Napoleon went 
even farther. He eliminated the Lord God 
from the creation of His own hand. When 
told upon one occasion by the Eussian Am- 
bassador, ^^Man proposes, but God disposes," 
his reply was, **I propose and I dispose." 



Humility. 157 

In a measure perhaps approximated by no 
other character of human history, Napoleon 
incarnated the individualistic spirit. In him- 
self he lived, moved, and had his being. His 
pitiable and penal end we all know. He veri- 
fies in graphic outline the Scriptural word: 
^' Pride goeth before destruction, and an 
haughty spirit before a fall;'' ^* Whosoever 
exalteth himself shall be abased;" **God re- 
sisteth the proud." Fundamentally, humil- 
ity is willing what God wills. It was Henri- 
Frederic Amiel who wrote : *^ Destiny has two 
ways of crushing us — ^by refusing our wishes 
and by fulfilling them. But he who only wills 
what God wills escapes both catastrophes." 
God as the life within our life and as the life 
transcending our life, has primal claim upon 
us now and always. All endeavors to evade 
Him invoke upon us an Iliad of woes. Man's 
capacity to will what God wills is the fine 
innuendo by which the finite soul makes its 
enormous claim. The word of all masterful 
souls in all ages has been: *^ Always our be- 
ing is descending into us from sources pro- 
found and inscrutable;" ^'I am constrained 
every moment to acknowledge a higher origin 



158 The Religion of a Person. 

for events tliaii tlie will I call mine;^' *'I de- 
sire and look up and put myself in the atti- 
tude of reception, but from some alien energy 
the visions come." "We lie open on one side 
to the deeps of spiritual nature, to all the at- 
tributes of God. Justice we see and know, 
Love, Freedom, Power. These natures no 
man ever got above, but always they tower 
above us, and most in the moments when our 
interests tempt us to wound them." Humil- 
ity is the avowal of man's insufficiency as op- 
posed to God's absolute sufficiency. It is the 
recognition of the exhaustibleness of our na- 
ture as opposed to God's inexhaustibleness. 
It is the musical metaphysics of Lord Ten- 
nyson : 

"Our wills are ours, we know not how. 
Our wills are ours to make them Thine. 

Our little systems have their day. 
They have their day and cease to be. 
They are but broken lights of Thee, 

And Thou, O Lord, art more than they." 

IL 

The lowly attitude is the teachable atti- 
tude. All life normally expressed is an ap- 



Humility. 159 

prenticeship to the trnth. It is a matricula- 
tion in the school of all arts and all sciences. 
Humility is the germinal principle of all in- 
tellectual and moral growth. It is the van- 
tage ground which commands all poetry, all 
philosophy, all painting, all music, all me- 
chanics, all chemistry, all government; in- 
deed, all spheres of being, whether organized 
or unorganized. The wise man must be the 
truly good man. As a New England seer 
sapiently remarks, *^So to be is the sole in- 
let of so to know.^' Goodness is the pre-con- 
dition of abiding greatness. A greatness of 
the fictitious character, like unto that of Al- 
cibiades, Catiline, Niccolo Macchiavelli, Lord 
Byron, Thomas Paine, may endure for a 
night, but with the uprising of a cloudless 
sun it is no more. No greatness is more en- 
during than *^the lightning which doth cease 
to be ere one can say. It lightens;" which 
conceives meanly of the resources of man; 
which conceives of art or music, of science, 
of politics, of commerce, of religion as any- 
thing less than an outlet for the whole mental 
energy, the whole moral energy, the whole 
spiritual energy of man. In the institution 



l6o The Religion of a Person. 

of His Kingdom on the earth Jesus called 
men to a discipleship, not to a rulership. His 
word is : * * Take My yoke upon you and learn 
of Me. If any man come to Me and hate 
(subordinate) not his father and mother and 
wife and children and brethren and sisters, 
yea, and his own life also, he can not be My 
disciple. And whosoever doth not bear his 
cross and come after Me, can not be My 
disciple." God's world is a school, whether 
interpreted in terms material, in terms men- 
tal, or terms moral. His world is a unit. 
The audacious fop who attempts a detach- 
ment of the dewdrop which the sun impearls 
on every leaf and flower from the raging cata- 
racts of Niagara, who would make alien the 
hushed earth sleeping in the soft arms of 
the embracing blue to the innocent babe 
nestling in the tender embrace of a loving 
mother, who would make of the thick ro- 
tundity of the globe a mass of facts rather 
than a transparent law — can not do other 
than win for himself in the light of sound 
thinking the unenviable appellation, fool. 
The word of prophet and of apostle are in 
strict agreement with all wisdom in the af- 



Humility. 161 

firmations: ^^The earth is tlie Lord's, and 
the fullness thereof; the world, and they that 
dwell therein ;*' '^By the word of the Lord 
were the heavens made; and all the host of 
them by the breath of His mouth : He gather- 
eth the waters of the sea together as an 
heap; He layeth up the depth in store- 
houses;'' *^Let all the earth fear the Lord; 
let all the inhabitants of the world stand in 
awe of Him;" *'For He spake, and it was 
done; He commanded, and it stood fast;" 
*^But to us there is but one God, the Father, 
of whom are all things, and we in Him;" 
*^For of Him and through Him and to Him 
are all things." The ecstatic voice of 
Thomas Carlyle in his ^^ Sartor Eesartus" 
commands the ear and the heart of men: 
**This fair Universe, were it the meanest 
province thereof, is in Yerj deed the star- 
domed City of God; through every star, 
through every grass-blade, and most through 
every Living Soul, the glory of a present 
God still beams. But Nature, which is the 
Time-vesture of God and reveals Him to the 
wise, hides Him from the foolish." The 
gravity of atoms and their elective affinities, 
11 



162 The Religion of a Person. 

as affirmed in the Jungfrau with its crest en- 
circled with the glow Elysian, in the Dakota 
wheatfield surpassing in wealth the fabled 
Pactolian sands, are but means and methods 
only for the expression of God's thought and 
will. The naturalist or observer who would 
declare them otherwise fails utterly in his in- 
terpretation of the deepest law of being. 
Nothing exists in the universe for its own 
sake and in its own strength. The surface on 
which we stand is not fixed, but flowing. Fix- 
tures in nature do not exist. The universe 
finds its similitude in running waters, in im- 
petuous winds, and not in resisting adamant 
or the firm-set earth. As the visible and 
tangible energy of personality the world is 
a continual flux, a perennial state of becom- 
ing. But with the ongoing of eternal gener- 
ation God, the Eternal Generator, abides. 
Hence the man whose spirit is clothed with 
humility seeks evermore to know Him, who 
is the center and cause of all life, who is 
superior to all finite knowledge and thought, 
and yet unfailingly draws near to us upon 
our drawing near to Him. 

The Kingdom of God has nothing to fear. 



Humility. 163 

as the organized expression of the Christian 
faith, from any principle of thought and ac- 
tion wherever operative. The timorous be- 
liever needs to cast oE his prejudices, the 
sworn antagonists of the day, and to employ 
the vivid figure of the Apostle Paul, *'Put on 
the Lord Jesus Christ," who is the sworn 
antagonist of the night. Darkness has no 
niche nor corner assigned to it by di\dne 
decree in the sphere of mind or of heart : ^ ^ 1 
am the Light of the world ; he that f oUoweth 
Me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have 
the light of life;'' ^*Li Him was life, and the 
life was the light of man;" *^That was the 
true light which lighteth every man that 
cometh into the world." The words attrib- 
uted to the dying Goethe are worthy of adop- 
tion by aspiring souls everywhither, ** Light! 
More Light!" 

The meaning of the divine incarnation in 
the person of Jesus Christ may be put in the 
one word. Light. Jesus gave practical illu- 
mination to love, to truth, to goodness, to 
power, to duty, to man, to heaven, to God. In 
His light we see light. He who follows the 
Christ of God does not walk in darkness,. 



164 The Religion of a Person. 

but has the light of life. The visible Chris- 
tian Church must evermore perform the func- 
tion of light-bringer to all men or become 
a stone of stumbling to all men. Distinctions 
must be made between substance and sem- 
blance, between reality and quackery, between 
truth and falsehood. If the Church of 
Christendom can not effect this service for 
a sinning but aspiring world, then is it in- 
deed the falsest and basest of shams. 

Jesus' message to all generations is: the 
universe is one vast symbol of God's al- 
mightiness of wisdom, of power, of love. 
Read and use that symbol wisely, and life 
eternal is yours, is His virtual declaration. 
Misread that symbol and misuse it, and the 
wrath of God abideth on you, is His cor- 
relative word. The visible Church has not 
always brought the light of Jesus Christ to 
the solution of life's perplexities, nor has it 
always embodied the Master's charity toward 
inquisitive and courageous souls. With some- 
what of frequency it has become a mental and 
moral despot. The fatherly and brotherly 
nature of God in Christ it has often repudi- 
ated with a blindness that indicated a pas- 



Humility. 165 

sion for blood in lien of a passion for sonls. 
God as a metaphysical monster has been too 
often its fundamental postulate. The postu- 
late, God is the world 's self-sacrificing Lover, 
the Savior from sin of every son and daugh- 
ter of humankind, the Friend who loveth at 
all times, the Brother born for adversity, it 
has too often slighted. It is a matter of ex- 
ceeding difficulty to convince ourselves in this 
year of almost complete Christian unity and 
co-operation that the name of Him who was 
meek and lowly in heart was ever the shibbo- 
leth of any man or body of men intent upon 
cruelty. But the chroniclings of history give 
us pause. Pernicious men have engendered 
rancorous conflicts, declaring themselves to 
be inspired by the motives of Jesus Christ. 
The doctrines of His cross they have taxed 
with unkindness, indeed, with a sanguinary 
vehemence. Simular men of virtue they 
were ; caitiffs that under covert and conveni- 
ent seeming practiced on men^s lives. No 
word of palliation is possible for Philip II 
of Spain; for the Duke of Alva, his blood- 
dieted henchman; for Pope Martin V, who 
from his crown to the toe was top-full of 



166 The Religion of a Person. 

direst cruelty. The *^ sightless couriers of 
the air'' have shouted the horrid deeds of 
these still more horrible men into the ear of 
consecutive centuries. Willful perverters of 
religious history have found a delectable unc- 
tion in exclaiming to their groundling audi- 
tors, If any man would be a believer in the 
Christian religion, let him read the history 
of the Inquisition. The raven, indeed, was 
hoarse that croaked the fatal entrance of 
John, of Wy cliff e, of John Huss, of Jerome, 
of the Waldensians, of the Huguenots, under 
the battlements of the Bomish hierarchy. 
The mediaeval persecutions, the fagot and the 
flame, the thumb-screw, the chair of torture, 
the sword with bloody instructions, the chal- 
ice with its ingredients of poison, comprise 
indeed a history compared to which the dun- 
nest smoke in hell is a meridian brightness. 
But it is a history not of the true Church 
of Jesus Christ, but of a corrupt ecclesiasti- 
cism which without warrant announced itself 
in stentorian tones the vice-gerent of the Son 
of God. Superficial observers insist that all 
Christendom must bear the burden of guilt 
which Leo X, Martin V, Alexander VI and 



Humility. 167 

their fellow-inquisitors incurred. But stu- 
dents and thinkers, whether Christians or 
non-Christians, see the fallacy of such an in- 
sistence. 

The teachable spirit, the learner's atti- 
tude, a becoming" modesty of soul, would have 
made impossible the volitional existence of 
the Duke of Alva, of Philip II, of Alexander 
VI, of Torquemado, and of their bloody- 
handed colleagues. He who sits at the feet 
of the Son of God hears the humane word: 
'^Blessed are the merciful, for they shall ob- 
tain mercy ; blessed are the peace-makers, for 
they shall be called the children of God;" 
*^Love your enemies, bless them that curse 
you, do good to them that hate you, and pray 
for them which despitefully use you and per- 
secute you, that ye may be the children of 
your Father which is in heaven.'' The min- 
istry of Jesus made of love the crowning dis- 
tinction, the supreme expression of a life in 
agreement with the will of God. The Eomish 
hierarchy did not accept the word and work 
of Jesus. They made religion identical with 
the privacy of the cloister, the odor of in- 
cense, the flagellations of the body, the pur- 



168 The Religion of a Person. 

chase of indulgences, the anthority of popes, 
prelates, and priests, the repetition of words, 
and innumerable other conformities to an ec- 
clesiastical mechanism. 

It is our profound and enthusiastic con- 
yiction that Protestantism has since its in- 
auguration by Martin Luther, the Wittenberg 
University professor, been the most potent 
of influences for the Christianization of the 
world and for the promotion of every art and 
science having as their objective the weal of 
the human family. But that Protestantism 
has been always free from corruption's taint, 
or that it has at all times reproduced the 
character and conduct of Jesus Christ, no 
impartial observer can avow. 

The xmdue emphasis on dogma has been 
the generator of misunderstanding and of 
malevolence at different periods of Protes- 
tant history. Strenuous efforts have at times 
been made to coerce men with an acceptance 
of the peculiar doctrinal conceptions of still 
more peculiar men. The gross error has been 
made of confusing individual interpretation 
of a doctrine with the doctrine itself. Vari- 
ous teachers have sought to make the God 



Humility. 169 

whicli they themselves fashioned the God of 
all other men. With the rejection of these 
individual deities persecutions have followed. 
Among the really great leaders of the Prot- 
estant Eeform every unbiased mind is com- 
pelled to place John Calvin. But that Calvin 
allowed himself with some frequency to de- 
generate into an irrational, uncharitable dog- 
matist, no unbiased mind can deny. In the 
midst of his battlings against a vicious pa- 
palism he permitted himself to be an abettor 
to the execution by fire of Michael Serve tus 
in 1553. Dr. George P. Fisher in his *^ His- 
tory of the Christian Church" states: ** Cal- 
vin believed that such an attack upon the 
fundamental truths of religion as Servetus 
had made should be punished by death.'' 
Cotton Mather, the illustrious scion of that 
illustrious sire, Eev. Increase Mather, the 
sixth president of Harvard College, can have 
no other place assigned to him in the history 
of New England late in the seventeenth and 
early in the eighteenth centuries but that of 
large ecclesiastical and political influence. 
But his participation in the furious persecu- 
tion of the unfortunate creatures accused of 



170 The Religion of a Person. 

witchcraft issued not from tlie spirit of the 
Son of man, who came to save rather than 
condemn the world, but from a dogma of 
rigor and vigor. Jonathan Edwards, rightly 
esteemed a valiant soldier under heaven's 
captaincy to do battle against the empire of 
darkness and of wrong, permitted in his ser- 
mon, *^ Sinners in the Hands of an Angry 
God," the awful splendor of Infinite Holiness 
to completely subdue the mild, equable radi- 
ance of Infinite Holiness as personalized in 
the Lord Jesus, the Friend of publicans and 
sinners. The tortures inflicted by the Angli- 
can Church upon all separatists, notably the 
Pilgrims and Puritans, were in the subse- 
quent history of the Pilgrims and Puritans 
inflicted upon the Quakers and upon Roger 
Williams and his followers. For the past 
century or more the Protestant Church in 
America and elsewhere has been emerging 
from the Plutonian shadows of dogma and 
entering the solar radiance of the Gospel of 
the Son of God. But from these shadows 
dense we are not wholly quit in this hour of 
abounding grace. Our bald literalism, like 



Humility. 171 

unto tlie garrulous Thersites of Agamem- 
non's army, still utters its voice. Nor does 
it always wait for occasion. But, like unto 
Thersites, it creates it. Dogmatic, literal- 
istic, circumscribed interpretations of Grod 
and man and their mutual relatedness found 
no hospitable abode in the mind of Jesus. 
He saw in Israel's outcasts, in Gentile pa- 
gans, in dissenters from the faith of Abra- 
ham, of Isaac, and of Jacob potential up- 
builders of the Kingdom of God. He saw in 
all men a great spiritual hope, a soulful sea 
in which to swim, a possible perpetual evan- 
gel, a sphere melody surpassing the sym- 
phony of the morning stars. We can not by 
any logical talisman identify a sanguinary 
dogmatist or a bald literalist, whether of days 
ancient or days modern, with the creed or 
the character of Christ. His summary of all 
law and all prophecy is found in the utter- 
ance, *'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God 
with all thy heart and with all thy soul and 
with all thy mind ; thou shalt love thy neigh- 
bor as thvself." Simultaneous with this 
spirit uncharitableness simply can not exist. 



172 The Religion of a Person. 

III. 

Humility is the affirmation of man's de- 
pendence on God. It is the declaration of 
God's transcendent wisdom and power. It 
is the rational disposition of the finite mind 
and heart. The Bible, the highest of revealed 
wisdom to man, ceaselessly emphasizes man's 
metaphysical and ethical dependence npon 
God. *^It is God that hath made ns, and not 
we ourselves;" ^^In Him we live and move 
and have our being," are postulates pro- 
phetic and apostolic; but in even greater 
reality they are postulates speculatively 
sound and practically proven. All thought 
collapses and every-day experience is with- 
out a reasonable interpretation only as we 
affirm God the Fundamental Eeality, the Be- 
setting Fact of universal being. Therefore 
the humbling of ourselves under the mighty 
hand of God is a necessity demanded and 
warranted by every principle of good judg- 
ment and rational living. The doctrine of 
the divine immanence and the divine tran- 
scendence is not established primarily 
through a priori processes, through periodic 
ecstatics, through ipsi dixit asseverations, 



Humility. 173 

but througH every conceivable legitimate con- 
dition and circumstance of human thinking 
and doing. John Euskin, whom Charlotte 
Bronte fitly characterized ^Hhe consecrated 
priest of the Abstract and Ideal, ' ' spoke ' ' the 
words of his life'' when he wrote: *^This we 
may discern assuredly: every true light of 
science, every mercifully granted power, 
every wisely restricted thought teach us more 
clearly day by day that in the heavens above 
and the earth beneath there is one continual 
and omnipotent Presence of help and of peace 
for all men who know that they live and re- 
member that they die." God is, and beside 
Him in the sense of finality there is no other. 
Every law of life is absolutely sensitive to 
the divine purpose. 

What we term the physical order of being 
is simply the way in which God evermore re- 
veals His wisdom and will in suns, in stars, 
in seas, in stones, in carnations, in chrysan- 
themums, in clay, in sand, in cock robin, in 
chewink, in lion, in leopard, in mote, in the 
human body. The confusion of thought 
which would give to God a priority in the 
realm of the spiritual, and deny to Him the 



174 The Religion of a Person. 

priority in the realm of the physical, was 
aptly characterized by the psalmist in the 
words/* The fool hath said in his heart, There 
is no God.'' The perennial ongoing of the 
physical order of life does not in any sense 
affirm an irrational, unconscious, necessitated 
world, but, contrariwise, affirms the consis- 
tency of the divine way of creating and con- 
serving physical life. Nothing of self-cen- 
tered reality can be rationally declared con- 
cerning the world of matter. It has no being, 
only as the form in which the divine purpose 
realizes itself. Our wisdom consists in ac- 
commodating ourselves to the laws which 
underlie physical existence and physical 
progress ; in recognizing a power wholly tran- 
scending our power ; a cosmic purpose wholly 
exceeding our knowledge, ever present and 
ever operative. The spirit of humility inter- 
prets life with becoming wisdom. Its atti- 
tude is that of the devout, aspiring, persistent 
learner. And such an attitude finds no an- 
swer in a self -inclosed, self-sufficient mechan- 
ical world. Hence the only answer which it 
discovers to all sane queries is, God. Hu- 



Humility. 175 

mility voices itself in Thomson's musical 
measure : 

" Hail, Source of being ! Universal Soul 
Of heaven and earth! Essential Presence, hail! 
To Thee I bend the knee; to Thee any thoughts 
Continual climb; who, with a master hand, 
Hast the great whole into perfection touched.'* 

Humility does not suffer us to be hypnotized 
by our own conceits. It is not forgetful of 
human inability to toy with the underlying 
principles of life. Coincident with the sense 
of his physical dependence upon God, the 
wise man keenly esteems his dependence upon 
God in the realm of moral aspiration, of spir- 
itual attainment. Exclusive of the Infinite 
Presence and Power we stand unrelated to 
the good, to the beautiful, to the true. Plato, 
despite the abstractness of his philosophy, 
made vast strides toward the personal phi- 
losophy of Christianity in affirming God to 
be the Idea of absolute Beauty, of absolute 
Good, of absolute Truth. 

The revealed word of the Kingdom of 
God is in strict agreement with all legitimate, 
with all complete thought relative to the de- 



176 The Religion of a Person. 

pendence of the finite personality upon God 
the Infinite Personality. Modem philosophy 
declares with no uncertain word that thought 
simply can not move without affirming at 
once the dependence and the relative inde- 
pendence of the finite spirit. The relative 
independence of the finite spirit is the de- 
mand of reason and of daily experience in 
order to rescue man from automatism, from 
irresponsible thought and action, and to make 
impossible the divine participation in our 
ignorance, in our folly, in our weakness, in 
our sin. But it is a fact confirmed by all 
experience that our relative independence 
only accentuates our dependence. If it is 
possible for us to so pervert our powers of 
mind, of heart, of conscience that the will of 
God concerning us may in large measure be 
defeated, how much more imperative it is 
that we seek in God that guidance, that 
strength, that purity which will make of our 
life the perpetual reproduction of His nature. 
It is the superficial thinker who gives 
primacy to the relative independence of the 
finite nature. It is the wise man who gives 
primacy to the dependence of man on God. 



Humility. 177 

'*It is God that hath made us, and not we 
ourselves;'' ^'Let all the earth fear the Lord: 
let all the inhabitants of the world stand in 
awe of Him ; for He spake, and it was done ; 
He commanded, and it stood fast : the counsel 
of the Lord standeth forever, the thoughts 
of His heart to all generations;'' ^^ Every 
good gift and every perfect gift is from 
above and cometh down from the Father of 
lights, with whom is no variableness, neither 
shadow of turning;" *^In Him was life, and 
the life was the light of men;" ^^In Him we 
live and move and have our being, ' ' are words 
of truth and soberness finding verification in 
our life with momentary recurrence. Bailey 
in his **Festus" wrote nicely: 

" Lowliness is the base of every virtue, 
And he who goes the lowest, builds the safest." 

And in like fashion wrote Thomas Moore: 

" Humility is that low, sweet root 
From which all heavenly virtues shoot." 

In the appreciation of our dependence upon 
God the spirit and utterance of prayer is the 
normal outflow, the normal articulation of 
our nature. 

12 



178 The Religion of a Person. 

Jesus ' hortatory word, *^Ask, and ye shall 
receive ; seek, and ye shall find ; knock, and it 
shall be opened unto you," and the Pauline 
exhortation, *^Pray without ceasing," are 
rooted in the sanities of thought and experi- 
ence. They are the abiding words of a per- 
sonal philosophy. Prayer is the protest that 
a self -running world is '^the idol of the sense 
den." It is the protest that nature through- 
out is an effect having its causality in God. 
It is the protest that since the world is a 
personal world, its life and its efficiency are 
dependent upon, the thought and will of God, 
its Creator and Conserver. It is the further 
avowal that God in the promotion of His 
thought and His will makes perennial use of 
man, the finite personality. Therefore prayer, 
concludes the complete thinker, is an essen- 
tial expression of the mind and heart of man. 
Thus the prayerful attitude, the attitude of 
dependence, of self-renunciation, becomes our 
abiding exaltation. God, responding to our 
asking, our seeking, our knocking, gives to 
man the place of power. In Emersonian 
speech, ^^ While seeking good ends, we are 
strong by the whole strength of nature. In 



Humility. 179 

so far as man roves from these ends, he be- 
reaves himself of power, of auxiliaries; his 
being shrinks out of all remote channels; he 
becomes less and less a mote, a point, until 
absolute badness is absolute death.'' Hu- 
mility is the effective prevention of our rov- 
ing from life 's good ends ; it is our agreement 
with the love of God, with the truth of God, 
with the efficiency of God. We come to 
ourselves in renouncing ourselves. Every 
downward step of this character is a step up- 
ward. Always and ever we must stoop if 
we would rise. 

IV. 

Humility is a becoming estimate of our 
individual worth. It is an estimate which, 
while appreciative of the moral person as the 
unit of values in the moral system, yet asserts 
the inescapable fact that all individual worth 
and efficiency have no meaning distinct from 
the social commonwealth. 

Eobinson Crusoe with his sense of right- 
ness and wrongness had nothing of value 
for society until his man Friday appeared 
upon the iscene. The mediaeval 'anchorite 



180 The Religion of a Person. 

secluded in Ms monastery or in a mountain 
fastness was socially a savor of death unto 
death, not of life unto life. Our individual 
morality is conditioned upon our incarnating 
for and among our fellow-men the ethical 
ideal of humanity. 

The order of our existence is not that of 
an aggregate of individuals, but as members 
of a social organism. The forms of law and 
of government, the upbuilding of industrial 
and commercial enterprises, the organization 
of schools and Churches have their genesis 
in, and their perpetuity through, society. It 
is thus apparent that what is termed the com- 
mon good can not fail to be a particular good. 
An established social order with its perma- 
nency and progressiveness in science, in art, 
in education, in commerce, in industry, in re- 
ligion, are indispensable goods for the indi- 
vidual. Thus, while the individual man is 
the center of ethical consciousness and the 
center of v/ill, and through him social ideals 
become active and e:ffective, yet what of real 
character that he possesses is the product of 
social life, and can not exist apart from so- 
cial life. He must act out his moral intui- 



Humility. 181 

tions, his etMcal consciousness, in concert 
with other men, in order to become a man of 
real character. 

A valid word is that of Goethe : * ^ Talent 
is developed in solitude; character in the 
stream of life." 

Shakespeare in his '* Measure for Meas- 
ure" becomes the champion of the social life, 
the altruistic nature, the moralizing of the 
individual through his promotion of the com- 
mon good. Thus he speaks through Vincen- 
tio to Angelo: 

" Thyself and thy belongings 
Are not thine own so proper as to waste 
Thyself upon thy virtues, they on thee; 
Heaven doth with us as we with torches do; 
Not light them for themselves ; for if our virtues 
Did not go forth of us 't were all alike 
As if we had them not. Spirits are not finely 

touched. 
But to fine issues." 

Jesus gave graphic description of the out- 
come of the egoistic, wholly selfish principle 
in the statements: *^ Except a com of wheat 
fall into the ground and die, it abideth 
alone;" *'He that loveth his life (self-cen- 
teredly) shall lose it." 



182 The Religion of a Person. 

Wheat harvests and every other kind of 
cereal wealth would reach a speedy surcease 
if men ceased to bury the seed within the 
eiarth at the appropriate season. Commer- 
cial progress would soon become a memory 
if men ceased to invest their capital, to bury 
it in new ventures. All educational advance 
would be a fiction for the youth of the land 
if the seclusion of the school, of the univer- 
sity was no longer sought. Individual spir- 
itual growth finds its rootage pre-eminently 
not in the hurryings to and fro of the city 
crowd, but in the place of retirement. Jesus 
as the interpreter above all prophets and 
apostles of the life of the soul, recognized 
this law of spiritual development and effi- 
ciency in the word of counsel, **When thou 
prayest, enter into thy closet ; and when thou 
hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which 
is in secret; and thy Father, which seeth in 
secret, shall reward thee openly." In sum- 
mary we must give our assent to a complete 
self-surrender, to a self-retirement, indeed, 
applying the figure of *^a corn of wheat" 
falling into the ground, to a self-abolition, if 
we would truly live in the social body. Jesus ' 



Humility. 183 

word is socially substructural : *^If any man 
desire to be first, the same shall be last of 
all and servant of all;'' *'He that loveth his 
life shall lose it; and he that loseth his life 
in this world shall keep it unto life eternal ; ' ' 
** Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground 
and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it 
bringeth forth much fruit.'' Eepudiation of 
our membership in the social organism has 
as its end a separation from the universal 
good, *^ abideth alone." Eepudiation of our 
membership in the social organism has as its 
end utter loss; *^He that loveth his life 
(solely for himself) shall lose it." 

Individual exaltation prior to the exalta- 
tion of the social commonwealth has as its 
consequent individual degradation; *^If any 
man desire to be first, the same shall be last 
of all and servant of all." All disregard of 
life as a social unit entails upon him who dis- 
regards a troop of woes. All regard of life 
as a social unit means for us inward peace 
and outward good. 

Aristotle, living in the morning of twi- 
light, the gray dawn of the social common- 
wealth, had nevertheless a clear perception 



184 The Religion of a Person. 

of the social ultimate, as evidenced in this 
sentence in his ^'Politics:" *^Man is more 
than an individual. By nature he is a po- 
litical animal who can attain his highest good 
only in society." The subordination of the 
individual for the common good has not 
found as a doctrine nor as a practice a hos- 
pitable lodgment upon its initial introduction. 
No people of the earth have manifested an 
exceeding eagerness to receive and to make 
it effective. The Jew of the first Christian 
century was excessively centripetal in his 
thought and in his activity. He had no 
brotherly regard for the Gentile. He denom- 
inated the imperial Eomans with the blood 
of Cato, of Cincinnatus, of Camillus, of 
Scipio, filling their veins as howling, hungry, 
lecherous dogs. In like manner he designated 
the high-browed, artistically featured Greeks, 
regardless of their descent, from Homer, 
Phidias, ^schylus, Euripides, Pythagoras, 
Aristotle, Apelles, Plato. And with no small 
warmth of feeling the Eoman and the Greek 
hesitated not to declare the descendants of 
Moses, of David, of Solomon rude, savage, 
beastly barbarians. Individualism pure and 
simple was everywhere in the ascendent. 



Humility. 185 

Tlie noble words of Jesus: ** Whosoever will 
save Ms life shall lose it ; and whosoever will 
lose his life for My sake shall find it ; ' ' * ^ Who- 
soever will be chief among you, let him be 
your servant/' were not cordially accepted 
by His contemporaries, nor by immediate suc- 
ceeding generations. 

Individualism battles vigorously for its 
life. The egoistic impulse does not surrender 
on demand. I, me, and mine are insistent 
upon their rights. The possibilities of the 
man through the medium of all men is a vision 
which the misdirected human will does not 
care to seek. 

But the day of a moralized society, the 
day of altruistic ascendency, the day of the 
supremacy of the common good is beginning 
to dawn. The good word, the universal word : 
^'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself ;'' 
*^A11 things whatsoever ye would that men 
should do to you, do ye even so to them;*' 
**None of us liveth to himself, and no man 
dieth to himself — ^is visiting confusion to- 
day upon the spirit and practice of individu- 
alism, upon the spirit and practice of Cain, 
the full-circled incarnation of selfishness. 
The ministry and the message of Jesus are 



186 The Religion of a Person. 

beginning to burst upon us with the exceed- 
ing radiance of a meridian sun. The soli- 
darity of the human family does not impress 
us to-day as the fashioning of a disordered 
fancy. It is impressing us as a practical fact. 
Tennyson's *^ Parliament of Man,'' his ^^Fed- 
eration of the World," are beginning to ap- 
pear in our eyes as something more than 
beautiful dreams. 

The brotherhood of man a few decades 
since was regarded as a bit of eloquence, but 
in this present day of Christian grace, with 
Europeans, Asiatics, Americans, South Sea 
Islanders, Africans, capitalists, laborers, col- 
legians, rustics touching elbows, looking 
steadily and genially into each other's eyes, 
it is infinitely more than a bit of stirring ora- 
tory. 

The ethical ideal which Jesus announced 
and which He incarnated is diumally finding 
among us, even though imperfectly, a reali- 
zation and a pursuit. It is the humbling of 
ourselves before God, in even greater degree 
in the days to come, which will alone make the 
realization more perfect and the pursuit far 
swifter. 



Chapter VI. 
FAITH. 



We live by Faith; but Faith is not the slave 
0£ text and legend: Reason's voice and God's, 
Nature's and Duty's never are at odds. 

— WHITTIER. 

Think not the Faith by which the just shall live 
Is a dead creed, a map correct of heaven, 

Far less a feeling fond and fugitive, 
A thoughtless gift, withdrawn as soon as given. 

It is an affirmation and an act 

Which bids eternal truth be present fact. 

—HARTLEY COLERIDGE. 



FAITH. 

I. 

The believing man is the wise man. He 
alone sees quite througli the deeds of men 
and things. He alone, in any sense whatso- 
ever, interprets the thought and the doings 
of God. No man with a modicum of reason 
ignores faith as an immanent and efficient 
principle of mental and moral activity. We 
are in reality born believers. The unbeliever 
is a monstrosity. He is not the immediate 
creation of God. He is a departure from the 
normial order of life. 

The believer is now, and always shall be, 
the new-bom bard of the Holy Ghost. He is 
God's man in all the earth. His acquaintance 
with God is a first-hand acquaintance. He 
is not the product of hypothesis or of hear- 
say. 

The man of faith is under the dominance 
of divine impulses. With momentary fre- 
quency he bursts the thin rinds of the visible. 

189 



190 The Religion of a Person. 

No pent-up Utica of space or time can bound 
Ms powers. He is the container of infinite 
fullness. Faith is the inlet into the deeps of 
Infinite Eeason, of Infinite Efficiency, of In- 
finite Love. All things are possible to him 
that believeth. There is a refining property 
in faith which accomplishes the perennial re- 
newal of all life. The believer knows not the 
day of old age. 

Not by science nor by mechanical power 
is the world made safe and habitable, but by 
the pre-eminence of faith. 

The absence of faith introduces always 
into life individual and into life social the 
reign of Chaos and Old Night. Faith is the 
absence of cloud and storm. It is the pres- 
ence of sunshine and serene days. It is the 
negation of folly and failure. It is the avowal 
of high-souledness and achievement. It is 
the open mind seizing upon the laws which 
traverse all being and which make articulate 
the manifoldness of the organized and unor- 
ganized universe. 

The believer is the true seer. He discerns 
the world of sense to be a world of shows; 
a pantomime of consummate cleverness, a 



Faith. 191 

phantasmagoria having reality for the puerile 
or fatuons mind, but for no other. He hesi- 
tates not to affirm in tones of Jovian thunder 
that all physical being is a subaltern, never a 
superior; that it is the periphery of lifers 
circle, and never its center ; that it is as false 
as dicers' oaths when detached from the 
thought and energy of personality. In his 
power to see, the believer repudiates all at- 
tachment to the utility and beauty of the phe- 
nomenal world. He does not esteem the 
thews of an Anakim or the wealth of a 
Croesus to be a final good. He does not place 
the imprint of finality on the blushing smiles 
of sunsets, the thought-executing fires of 
thunderbolts, the heavings to and fro of Nep- 
tune and his brood. His evaluation of things 
phenomenal is in terms of personal being. 
And in personality, free, intelligent, and pur- 
posive, he discerns all utility and all beauty. 
Pitching his tent on this ^^ sacred volcanic 
isle of nature," the primal passion of his be- 
ing is to behold the splendor of God bursting 
through each chink and cranny. His life is 
not an allegiance to a sensual prudence; it 
is not a devotion to matter; it is not the as- 



192 The Religion of a Person. 

signment of premiersMp to the exquisite 
sense of the palate, the discriminating nerves 
of the nose, the finger, to the exact properties 
of the eye and the ear. He is a seer, a pene- 
trater, the real discemer of spirits. To him 
belongs the magic of spirit- testing. The 
scientist, the tradesman, the poet, the politi- 
cian, the artist, the mechanic, the tiller of the 
soil, if non-believers, cheapen their pursuits 
into petty ends. The believer makes of his 
pursuit, whether artist or artisan, whether 
poet or peasant, whether employer or em- 
ployee, a magnanimous means by which the 
currents of universal being enrich all men 
and make glad the city of God. The believer 
is the Proteus of purity and of power. He 
circulates, in turn, through every part and 
particle of life. In him there is a central 
identity. The qualities and shades of real 
being find in him a successive setting-forth. 
The man of faith alone dignifies every cir- 
cumstance. He interprets all particulars in 
the light of catholicity. To him the stone is 
more than stone, the sea is more than sea, the 
sun is more than sun. All these and every 
other form of physical being he ennobles and 



Faith. 193 

advances because of the high order of his 
approach. The law of substance he applies 
to the plane of surface. In the sculpture of 
the firmament al globes, in the blithesome 
footsteps of the Dawn, in the sounding of 
Triton 's wreathed horn, in the metallic clinks 
of dollars and cents, in the clod of earth in- 
stinct with chemical might, he writes the 
moral law. The world to him is a personal 
world. It is thought visualized. It is will 
in action. Such a conception of life is wise. 
No other conception is. 

II. 

The fundamental character of faith is af- 
firmed by all speculative thought in vocables 
no less ingenious and distinct than those em- 
ployed in practical thought. A rejection of 
the immanence and exclusive efficiency of per- 
sonality is the badge and sign of mental con- 
tumacy, not of mental candor. The skeptic 
in terms blustering like unto those of Hector, 
the Trojan warrior, may announce his belief 
in those things only which have the sensible 
and true avouch of his eyes, his hands, his 
ears. But the stunning confutation of his 

13 



194 The Religion of a Person. 

nonsense before men and angels is effected by 
every principle of sound tbinking. In the in- 
terpretation of tbe most ordinary facts of 
pbenomenal existence we are coerced to tbe 
conclusion tbat wbat we are pleased to term 
actual knowledge bas no significance apart 
from tbe complex rational activity of tbe free 
self. All knowledge, wbetber of star systems, 
of sea waves, of telepbone receivers, of 
grapbopbones, of empire building, is an ac- 
tive process, and not a passive reception of 
ready-made information from witbout. 
Tbings ^nd tbougbts become ours only as we 
tbink tbem. Tbrougb our determination and 
activity tbe regulative ideas of reason must 
be imposed upon experience, else experience 
itself is a figment, a feint, a formalism. 

Tbis principle in application to all being, 
finite and infinite, makes of tbe sensible and 
true avoucb of our eyes, our bands, our ears, 
a most untenable assumption. Tbe boasted 
realities of scientific tbougbt and experiment 
cease to be realities wben subjected to critical 
inquiry. In every field of our supposed 
knowledge belief bolds tbe vantage ground. 
Tbe materialistic, and tberefore atbeistic. 



Faith, 195 

pMlosopHy whicH would make of the atom a 
solid, massy, hard, movable, extended, inde- 
structible, and ultimate reality, has long since 
suffered repudiation at the hands of a pro- 
gressive mechanical physics. The transition 
of the rigid, extensive, elastic atom to a mass- 
point, having within it a resident force, and 
from thence to a dynamical fiction, has been 
steady and sane. "We no longer look upon 
atoms, molecules, primordial fluids and their 
so-called inherent energies as presentable 
facts, but as convenient inventions of the 
mathematician, as serviceable descriptive 
symbols. 

Professor James Ward in his ''Natural- 
ism and Agnosticism '^ voiced a sound meta- 
physics in the conclusion ; ' * The very advance 
of physics is proving the most effectual cure 
for the ignorant faith in matter and motion 
as the inmost substance rather than the most 
abstract symbols of the sum of existence." 
Thus we find ourselves thrown back upon 
every contemplation of the physical realm, 
upon the sphere of personal activity. The 
supposed knowledge of the external world 
is not in reality knowledge, but a reasonable 



196 The Religion of a Person. 

belief. This belief roots itself not in tbe 
fancied stability of cloud banks, nerve cen- 
ters, dancing atoms, but in the unchangeable 
wisdom, will, goodness, and ceaseless activity 
of God. He is before all things, and by Him 
all things consist. 

The universe is the work of spirit. In 
like fashion the conversion of nature into art 
through human thought and energy is the 
finite spirit working in leal-hearted subserv- 
ience -to the Infinite Spirit. The Pauline 
statement of faith is the word of speculative 
thought: '* Faith is the substance of things 
hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.'' 

In the choice between substance and sem- 
blance, between evidence and error, the wise 
man brooks no hesitant voice or step. 
Thomas Carlyle wrote with singular insight : 
< ^ The great universal war which alone m^kes 
up the true history of the world is the war of 
Belief against Unbelief; the struggle of men 
intent on the real essence of things against 
men intent on the semblances and forms of 
things. ' ' 

The modern speculative thinkers, finding 
their prototype in Democritus, the Greek 



Faith. 197 

philosopher, who would educe life, mind, 
poetry, art, industry, government, science, 
Socrates, Dante, Titian, Agassiz, Henry Bes- 
semer, James Madison, indeed everything 
and everybody, from condensing mists, pri- 
meval cloud banks, may protest much that 
their philosophy is not an atheistic, unbeliev- 
ing philosophy, but as an interpretation of 
the multifariously correlated world in which 
we discover ourselves it is as Carlyle puts 
it: war against those who are ^ intent on 
the real essence of things," who affirm be- 
lief to be a fundamental dynamic in all 
thought and action. This war between sub- 
stance and semblance, between belief and 
non-belief, is hoary with age and yet new- 
born. The clash of opposing shields vibrates 
to-day as on the yesterday. To find reality 
in the realm of the seen, to give to it a mi- 
nutely delineated contour, engrossed Thales, 
Heraclitus, Anaximenes, Democritus, August 
Comte, Herbert Spencer, and other minds of 
proven astuteness. To find reality in the 
realm of the unseen, with a profound disre- 
gard, for all picture-making, engrossed Soc- 
rates, Plato, Aristotle, Bishop Berkeley, Im- 



Id3 The Religion of a Person. 

manuel Kant, Frederick William Hegel, Bor- 
den P. Bowne, and other minds of consum- 
mate power. The first named would make 
all knowledge a sensuous assurance. Tlie 
last named repudiate the primacy of the 
senses, because of the inextricable confusion 
which all image-making thought produces, 
both in theory and in practice. Bloodless 
syllogisms, metaphysical quagmires, mechan- 
ical deities, ethical pitfalls are the perennial 
products of pictorial thinking. The faith at- 
titude toward all phases of being is the only 
rational attitude. It is the attitude of a sane 
metaphysics, of an invincible logic, of a con- 
sistent ethics, of a pure and serviceable the- 
ism. Such an attitude easily dissolves by a 
thought the solid-seeming block of matter, 
makes of all physical law a projection of per- 
sonal power, and affirms with every reason- 
ableness the dependence of all being, whether 
organic or inorganic, sensate or insensate, in- 
dividual or social, upon the ever-present 
wisdom and will of God. Faith alone has 
speculative access into the deeps of Eeason. 
All knowledge that would exclude faith sinks 
ever deeper into confusion's bog. To walk 



Faith. 199 

by faith and not by sight is speculative and 
practical wisdom. 

ni. 

Faith voices itself in a reasonable appre- 
ciation of ourselves. No man is worthy of 
membership in the social commonwealth who 
has not a vivid and discriminating sense of 
the sacredness and inviolability of his own 
mental and moral nature. Self-sanctity in- 
vests with reality the sanctity of others. He 
who does not regard himself is invariably 
without regard for his fellows. 

" To thine own seK be true, 
And it must follow as the night the day. 
Thou canst not then be false to any man." 

Society is a soul wholly embodied : it is a 
body wholly ensouled. Every individual man 
is therefore a social hand, a social eye, a so- 
cial ear, a social conscience, a social brain. 
In himself there is to be a perpetual resist- 
ance to all vitiating powers, a perpetual co- 
operation with all ennobling powers. His 
work is to exercise the highest functions of 
mind and heart. Above all private consid- 



200 The Religion of a Person. 

eration, all petty ends, lie is to rise as by a 
specific levity. His nourisliment is to be on 
tbongbts and affections, public and illustri- 
ous. A just evaluation of our individual life 
implies an appreciation of our mental integ- 
rity. 

"We sball see ourselves through the me- 
dium of self-respect to be the miniature 
paraphrase of universal history. We shall 
readily discover our citizenship in the de- 
mocracy of culture. In Plato we shall behold 
our speculative elder brother. Through Au- 
gustine we shall hear with trumpet tongue 
the secrets of our inmost soul. In the medi- 
tations of Marcus Aurelius we shall behold 
ourselves looking with eager eye toward the 
open heavens. In the ministry of self-sacri- 
ficing and yet self -expressing of Paul the 
Apostle we shall distinguish the possibilities 
of our own nature under the dominance of 
the spirit of Jesus Christ. 

The creation of a thousand fields of 
golden cereal God infolded in the primal 
grain of wheat. In the divine introduction 
of the principle of cohesion was potential all 
springs, all rivers, all seas. In like fashion 



Faith, 201 

the sculpture of Angelo, the eloquence of 
Chrysostom, the state-craft of Bismarck, the 
ecclesiastical powers of Wesley, the epical 
genius of Milton were predicated in the first 
man. All history has come through individ- 
ual thought, individual feeling, individual ef- 
ficiency. And this individual man must read 
his own writing, else the lips of history are 
more securely sealed than are those of the 
Egyptian Sphinx. 

A proper esteem of our mental integrity 
gives to us an easy supremacy over the most 
formidable features of all lower e<?onomies. 
The stars had no secrets when Sir William 
Herschel looked upon them. The apparently 
impenetrable particles of porphyry and gran- 
ite became pellucid waters at the touch of 
Hugh Miller. The oriole, the pewee, the her- 
mit thrush could not seclude their thoughts 
and feelings when James Audubon with 
kindly but curious step invaded their dwell- 
ings. There is no conceivable magic which 
can withhold the virtue of oxygen, nitrogen, 
phosphorus, carbon from the expressed will 
of Thomas Edison. 

A perverter of personality is the man 



202 The Religion of a Person. 

who acknowledges himself a mental subaltern 
within any sphere of God's world. In the 
mental image, in the mental likeness of God 
is our creation. This is the meaning of men- 
tal integrity. It is the intellectual sluggard, 
and he alone, who looks with craven eye 
upon the physical world with its seeming 
wall of flint. It is not a wall of flint to the 
mind which properly appraises itself. To 
such a mind it is softer than a cygnet's 
down, it is less resisting than an infant's 
hand, it is the most willing of servants. An 
obvious point of diverg-ence of Christian civ- 
ilization from savagery and heathenism is 
the Christian appreciation of mental integ- 
rity. 

The Congo tribesman, the Chinese coolie, 
the Hindoo fakir are without esteem for the 
wholeness of their intellectual nature. They 
interpret themselves in fragments, and as a 
consequent they interpret the universe in 
fragments. Under the dominance of their 
■senses they stand in awe of the sun, of the 
sea, of the moon, of birds, of beasts, of alien 
tribes and peoples. 

Superstition gross and cruel, an incom- 



Faith. 203 

parable mental irresoluteness make of their 
day *^a day of clouds and thick darkness.'' 
In doctrine and in deed tliey are creatures of 
unbelief. 

A respect for our mental integrity is a 
disregard of all superficial consistency. It 
is a supreme regard for the unity and sanc- 
tity of personality. Intellectual wholeness 
flows with the flow of nature. It is open- 
minded. It does not fixate symbols and de- 
clare them to be eternal facts. Such a fixa- 
tion has in great degree characterized the 
papal Church during its entire career. In 
the quasi saints, in their bony relics, in the 
holy water, in the swinging censer, in the 
breath of the confessional, in the word of 
pope, of prelate, of priest Eomanism affirms 
an immediate and potent virtue. All heath- 
enism is a superficial fixation of thought. It 
is a refusal to explore the centuple meaning 
of every sensuous and spiritual fact. The 
supersensual utility of the sun, the sea, the 
moon, the mountain range, the flower, the 
fruit, of all personal efficiency, whether in 
thought or thing, the heathen does not per- 
ceive. He does not interpret them as aco- 



204 The Religion of a Person. 

lytes with Mercurial feet and willing band, 
eager to render a service peculiar and power- 
ful to man thinking, to man willing, to man 
feeling. What Buddha, Confucius, Moham- 
med, Laotzu, princes, potentates, priests, and 
parents have said and done is for the heathen 
world the genesis and the finality of all 
thought and efficiency. They fixate the phe- 
nomenal world. They arrest its flow. They 
do not see all phenomena as metamorphosis, 
as life seeking new and higher form, more 
and better content. 

The endless multiformity possible to 
thought, to will, to emotion, finds no affirma- 
tion in a stagnant ecclesiasticism, whether 
papal or Protestant, nor in a heathenism 
whose chief characteristic is a perpetual dei- 
fication of the past. The rise and fall of 
European civilizations, the political and re- 
ligious heavings to and fro of American life, 
have afforded much merriment to Asiatic 
critics. Eomish hierarchs have in like fash- 
ion made the continuous revolutions of Prot- 
estant thought and progress a proverb, a by- 
word, a hissing. Both the heathen and papal 
devotee assert their systems of thought to 



Faith. 205 

be the only consistent systems existent among 
men. The identity of a fatuous consistency 
with a stenchy stagnation has not yet come 
within the foci of their vision. A respect for 
mental integrity is the affirmation of a pres- 
ent, progressive faith in a present progress- 
ive God. It is the avowal of the permanency 
of personality, not of the phenomena that 
have their genesis and their end in personal- 
ity. Protestantism, the most vital of reli- 
gious expressions known to humankind, will 
command for itself a larger and ever-increas- 
ing sphere of influence in the world 's thought 
and activity when it places the supreme em- 
phasis without intermission on personality, 
and not on the phenomenal energies of per- 
sonality. Such an emphasis will make im- 
possible the vindication or condemnation of 
any man or body of men on the mere ground 
of verbal statement. Personality is the 
maker of creeds. *^The Kingdom of God is 
not in word, but in (personal) power. ^' 

The believer has faith in the moral in- 
tegrity of himself as a propagandist of the 
principles and practice of the Kingdom of 
God. He properly appraises what is in- 



206 The Religion of a Person. 

volved in the co-operation of the finite person- 
ality with the Infinite. The apostolic word, 
**Ye are laborers together with God,'' and 
the Messianic word, *^Son, go work to-day in 
My vineyard," have for him a practical sig- 
nificance that is beyond all speculative in- 
terpretation. In them he hears an authority 
that invests every willing and obedient heart 
with a character that admits of no legitimate 
depreciation. No man of spiritual percep- 
tion, of ethical discrimination underprizes 
for a moment the insufficiency, mental, moral, 
and spiritual, of the human, when brought 
into contrast with the Divine. But with equal 
truth we may say no man of spiritual per- 
ception, of ethical discrimination affirms the 
ethical and spiritual wholeness of God's 
world exclusive of human character and con- 
duct. The mysterious profound elements of 
such an apparent paradox confuse all 
thought, but do not affect the fact. The ab- 
soluteness of God being in any sense obli- 
gated to or dependent upon personal finite- 
ness, is of equal truth with man's absolute 
obligation to and dependence upon God. 
How such things can be, we do not essay 



Faith. 207 

to answer. But that they are true, no man 
can gainsay. The establishment of right- 
eousness upon the earth God conditions upon 
the willing co-operation of man. This was 
the evident purpose of the incoming of the 
Son of God into the world. If the regnancy of 
righteousness was possible or feasible ex- 
clusive of human help, then why the humili- 
ation, the passion, the crucial shame endured 
by Him who was the fullness of the Godhead 
bodily? Hence the thesis : The believing man 
has a confidence in himself as a moral unit 
in the Divine thought and purpose. Man 
without peradventure completes himself in 
God; and in a manner peculiar and quite 
beyond all penetration God completes Him- 
seK in man. Emerson in his discernment of 
man's moral greatness, and of the antithet- 
ical fact, man's moral limitation, spoke a 
perspicuous word, *'I am God in nature; I 
am a weed by the wall." 

He who rightly esteems himself as a moral 
and spiritual integer does not deport him- 
self as a timorous, apologetic, desponding 
whimperer. The Medusa face of ill fortune 
does not convert him into a duteous knee- 



208 The Religion of a Person. 

crooking knave. He does not shrink at the 
foot-fall of any spatial or temporal Diabolus. 
He invites all opposition whose aspect is bat- 
tailous toward love, truth, and goodness. 
He is no parlor soldier. The rugged battle 
of fate where strength is born he shuns not. 
His nature is mightily solvent. For him a 
simple purpose is as strong as an iron ne- 
cessity is to others. He conceives magnifi- 
cently of himself because of his unshaken, 
unseduced, unterrified loyalty to the princi- 
ples and practices of the Kingdom of God. 
He is God's man. He is God's helper. 

IV. 

The believer has an abiding confidence in 
his brother-man. This confidence does not 
issue primarily from the open history of the 
individual man nor from great bodies of men. 
It is prophecy rather than fulfillment which 
evokes our living and limitless faith in each 
other. It is the man in his transient splen- 
dors, rather than in his steady shining, which 
blinds us with excess of light, and makes 
pardonable the adoption of the revealed 
word, ^^No man can look upon My face and 



Faith. 209 

live.'* The poetical ancients fabled Apollos 
the god tending the flocks of Admetus in dis- 
guise. This voice of fable has in it some- 
what divine. It came from a thought above 
the will of the writer. It is a universal word. 
It is the parable of man's being and becom- 
ing. In the possible grandeurs of the soul 
man is God's image, God's likeness, God's 
vice-gerent under the limitations of space 
and time. But in life's ordinary circum- 
stance we often repress the grandeurs pos- 
sible to the soul, and thus disguise our es- 
sential selfhood, as did Apollos in his tend- 
ance on the flocks of Admetus. All appeals 
to consciousness declare fixtures in men to 
be fictitious. Perpetual prophecies we are of 
the next age ; suggestions of what we should 
be. Greater possibilities are sleeping, but 
never dead, in every man. The residuum, 
mental and moral, in finite personality is un- 
known, beyond analysis. The import of this 
fact is second only to the transcendence of 
the Infinite nature. It is this faith in the 
vast worth of man, capable ever of immense 
and innumerable expansions, that saves hu- 
man society from the ceaseless cynicism of 

14 



210 The Religion of a Person. 

a Diogenes and puts an end to tlie sangui- 
nary thirst of a Eoman Claudius and a 
French Eobespierre. 

The social commonwealth would long 
since have become a stagnant putrescence, a 
loathsome accursed death, if the individual 
man was not in embryo the veritable organ 
of the Holy Ghost. 

Jesus, the transcendently beneficent heart, 
hand, eye, ear, tongue, and brain of the King- 
dom of God, was the prof oundest believer in 
man of which human history gives any chron- 
icle. In man He saw the only great phenom- 
enon. All other phenomena were tributary 
to man. In the latent nature of the publican, 
the first-century political grafter, in the 
sleeping potencies of the sinner, the moral 
and spiritual leper, He descried the bowers of 
love, joy, peace, and the realms of right and 
wrong. He discerned a moral power, a 
spiritual pliancy in the habitue of Caper- 
naum streets, in the tomb-dwellers of Ga- 
dara, in the crustacean frequenter of Judean 
synagogues. The eternal revelation He knew 
was the property of all men. The world is 
God's world and all that is therein, was His 



Faith. 211 

message as a preacher of the Kingdom of 
heaven. Mr. Emerson spoke with singular 
penetration in his address to the Harvard 
Divinity Class in 1838; ^^ Jesus Christ be- 
longed to the true race of prophets. He saw 
with open eye the mystery of the soul. 
Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with 
its beauty, He lived in it and had His being 
there. Alone in all history He estimated the 
greatness of man. One Man was true to 
what is in you and me. He saw that God 
incarnates Himself in man and evermore 
goes forth anew to take possession of His 
world. . . . He is, I think, the only Soul in 
history who has appreciated the worth of 
a man." 

V. 

All faith in the ascendancy of personality 
over the phenomenal world, in the efficiency 
of ourselves as integral factors in spheres 
mental and moral, in the exceeding worth of 
our brother-man, has its genesis solely in our 
faith in God, the Intensest of all Eealities, 
the Maker and Preserver of all men, the 
Author and Finisher of all living faith. 



312 The Religion of a Person. 

** Theism," as Prof. B. P. Bowne in his 
*^ Theism" declares, ^4s the fundamental 
postulate of all life. Our cognitive and spec- 
ulative interests, as well as our moral and 
religious interests, are so bound up with The- 
ism as to stand or fall with it. If we say that 
Theism is strictly proved by nothing, we 
must also admit that it is implicit in every- 
thing. It can not be demonstrated without 
assumption, we admit, but it can not be de- 
nied without wrecking all our interests." 

False philosophies that have denied to 
God an all-inclusive personal nature have 
found their speculative mischief returning 
upon their own heads. In the denial of the 
inherence and dominance of all truth, all love, 
all goodness, all power, all freedom, all pur- 
pose in God, they have ignored the law of 
the sufficient reason, that principle of logic 
which demands an adequacy in the premises 
for every conclusion, a commensurability be- 
tween all effect and cause. In every expres- 
sion and relationship of finite personality we 
ceaselessly affirm in theory and in practice 
truth, love, goodness, power, freedom, pur- 
pose as inherent and dominant principles. 



Faith. 213 

Hence, despite all materialism, all atheism, 
all causal evolutionism, all agnosticism, the 
conscious, free, efficient man finds his imme- 
diate and transcendent selfhood in the con- 
scious, free, and efficient God. This is the 
only possible application of the law of the 
sufficient reason. It is in life, and in life 
only, that the theistic postulate finds its 
ground and warrant. The shuffling of the ab- 
stract categories love, truth, goodness, free- 
dom, gives no light on the problems of 
thought or experience. It is their imposition 
upon life in its manifold articulation that 
gives them worth. 

Faith in God is the law of mental and 
moral gain. ** According to your faith be it 
unto you,'' is as true logically and metaphys- 
ically as it is religiously. All mental and 
moral self-preservation and self-realization 
are conditional on faith. The scientist can 
give to us no final description of gravity, of 
cohesion, of crystallization, of the affinities 
between the human body and food, between 
the ray of light and the petal of the rose. 
His only conceivable final word is : All sensu- 
ously presentable phenomena are empty of 



214 The Religion of a Person, 

all positive content, and the whole system of 
physical dynamics, except as a set of formal 
mathematical relations, is a pure illusion. 
The only validity of phenomena and of phys- 
ical dynamics is found in their relatedness to 
personality. Therefore faith is as funda- 
mental in all scientific inquiry and in all me- 
chanical achievement as it is in matters 
wholly religious. Eliminate faith as a dy- 
namic, and the whole structure of scientific 
thought, of speculation, and of society falls 
into a heap. Faith in God is the bond which 
unites us to all particular knowledge and 
power. Great educational systems and in- 
stitutions unite in the avowal of this fact. 
Governmental systems, industrial and com- 
mercial systems do likewise. All life, they 
affirm, finds its causal ground in personality, 
in the invisible kingdoms of reason, of will, 
of sensibility. The universe, they affirm, is 
the forthgoing of energy according to ra- 
tional ideas. Faith in God is the region of 
all the virtues. It is the primary, the ab- 
original sentiment which translates all life, 
from the circumference to the center of being, 
where as in the closet of God we see the 



Faith. 215 

operation of causes and anticipate tlie uni- 
verse, which is but a slow effect. It is the 
power of growth within us, a perpetual 
doubling of the mind and heart that is never 
content with less than new infinities of love, 
of purity, of power. To adopt the Pauline 
phraseology, *^It is God working in us, both 
to will and to do of His good pleasure ; it is 
our working out our own salvation with 
fear and trembling." 

Faith in God is a dismissal of all particu- 
lar uncertainty and fear. It is the adjourn- 
ment of all private riddles and their solution 
to the sure revelation of God's own time and 
season. It is the confidence that all life, of 
which our own is a miniature paraphrase, is 
dear to the heart of God. It is the loyal and 
loving acceptance of Jesus' word : **Fear not, 
little flock; for it is your Father's good pleas- 
ure to give you the Kingdom;" **Are not five 
sparrows sold for two farthings, and not 
one of them is forgotten before God? But 
even the very hairs of your head are all 
numbered. Fear not therefore, ye are of 
more value than many sparrows." 

A universal reliance is his who descries 



216 The Religion of a Person. 

all life to be the word and work of God ; who 
believes profoundly that within the embrace 
of God's great and tender heart all souls are 
locked. Such faith sees not within the wide 
range of legitimate thought and experience 
a valve, a wall, an intersection. But as one 
blood flows with rapture through all human 
hearts, and as one crystal wave comprises all 
seas, so all love, all truth, all goodness, all 
power are the influxes of God into aspiring 
and achieving souls. God is the great ** Alien 
Energy, '' from whom all true visions come; 
He is the Wisdom by whom the horoscope of 
all ages may be read; He is, in Emersonian 
phrase, *Hhe Wise Silence, the Universal 
Beauty, the Eternal One/' 



Chapter VII. 
WORK. 



While earnest thou gazest, 
Comes boding of terror, 
Comes phantasm and error. 

Perplexes the bravest 
With doubt and misgiving. 

But heard are the Voices — 

Heard are the Sages, 

The Worlds and the Ages; 
Choose well, your choice is 

Brief, and yet endless. 

Here eyes do regard you. 

In eternity's stillness; 

Here is all fullness. 
Ye brave, to reward you: 

Work and despair not. 

—GOETHE. 

No man is born into the world whose work 
Is not born with him; there is always work. 
And tools to work withal, for those who will. 

• ••••• 

The busy world shoves angrily aside 

The man who stands with arms akimbo set. 

Until occasion tells him what to do; 

And he who waits to have his task marked out. 

Shall die and leave his errand unfulfilled. 

—JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 



WOEK. 

I. 

The idler finds no hospitable abode witbin 
tbe wide range of universal being. He is at 
odds with tbe order of life. He is tbe one 
stranger in realms eartbly and heavenly. 
But tbe worker is at borne in all parallels. He 
discovers in bis activity a correspondence 
between bimself and all forms of created life. 
He discovers between bimself and God, tbe 
Maker of beaven and eartb, bonds more bind- 
ing tban tbose of buman kinship. Idleness 
is without respect for all phases of phenome- 
nal and metaphysical being. It is the em- 
bodiment of real anarchism. All work is ac- 
quaintance with nature. Every stroke of 
labor — ^physical, mental, moral — ^means for 
us tbe acquisition of new secrets as to the 
Why and How of God's world. Tbe mere 
dreamer knows nothing with assurance. The 
worker makes application of all the princi- 
ples that underlie universal experience. He 

219 



220 The Religion of a Person. 

makes an easy transition from the seen to 
the miseen, from temporal and spatial bound- 
ary lines to the uncircnmscribed precincts 
of ontological being. He does not rest eon- 
tent with assumptions. He pierces to the 
core of thoughts and things, and discovers 
proofs. Cause and effect are with him the 
upper and under sides of the same fact ; they 
are the abiding chancellors of the universal 
exchequer ; they are the co-existence of means 
and ends. 

The sluggard flatters himself that by the 
employment of some black art he can outwit 
the order of life; that by some hocus-pocus 
he can detach the life of the senses from the 
life of the soul; that the perfect compensa- 
tions of the universe admit of easy defeat. 
The sluggard forgets that while the underly- 
ing laws of life are fundamentally beneficent, 
yet they resent all attempts at infraction. 
And their resentment is pitiless. No man has 
yet met with a success in antagonizing or dis- 
regarding the primary principles of being. 
The early poets relate that stone walls, iron 
swords, leathern thongs had an occult sym- 
pathy with the wrongs of their owners ; that 



Work. 221 

tlie belt wMcli Ajax gave to Hector dragged 
the Trojan hero over the field at the wheel 
of the chariot of Achilles, and that the sword 
which Hector gave Ajax was that on whose 
point Ajax fell. It is also their record in 
rhythm that a rival of Theogenes, the victor 
in the games to whom the Thracians erected 
a statue, went by night and endeavored by 
repeated blows to throw it down, and upon 
its fall from the pedestal was himself crushed 
to death. This back-stroke, this kick of the 
gun, this absolute balance of Give and Take, 
are sure in their operation. They affirm that 
life is moral and, if respected, reinforces and 
refreshes us. But if disregarded, it grinds 
us to powder. The idler apparently forgets 
that all laws and all substances unite in the 
persecution and punishment of such as he. 
Life is not an indifferent possession. It is 
a trust, a duty, a privilege of the most sacred 
character. It has within it the train of cities. 
States, republics, kingdoms, institutions edu- 
cational and philanthropic, individual and so- 
cial efficiency. It is God making Himself 
manifest in and through us. The worker so 
esteems his life and that of his fellows. 



222 The Religion of a Person. 

Hence lie bestirs Mmself for the bringing to 
pass of the will of God. * * One monster there 
is in the world: the idle man. What is his 
Eeligion 1 That Nature is a Phantasm where 
cunning, beggary, or thievery may sometimes 
find good victual. That God is a lie; and 
that man and his life are a lie. ' ' Thus Car- 
lyle arraigns the idler, he whose plea is, **Yet 
a little sleep, a little slumber, a little fold- 
ing of the hands to sleep," and of whom 
Shakespeare wrote, *^His blood is very snow- 
broth." An intolerance of all folly, of all 
baseness, of all stupidity, of all poltroonery 
is the spirit of the worker. He observes life 
as a disclosure of God, and toward all ele- 
ments antagonistic of God he cherishes a 
deep and conscious abhorrence. He repudi- 
ates the base notion that mammonism is the 
essence of God's world; that life in its true 
meaning and true efficiency is a thing of 
purchase, of adventitious value, a terrene, 
godless embodiment. 

Sloth is ever ready to make all men 
Midas-eared. It is ever ready to make of 
truth, of beauty, of goodness subordinates of 
pence, of pounds, and to convert the rational 



WORK. 223 

soul into the serf of Mammon, whom Milton 
termed **the least erected spirit that fell 
from heaven." Bnt labor resents the con- 
fusion of itself with diabolism. It is a per- 
version of speech to say of the worker in his 
conscious struggles to make the immethodic 
methodic, the waste arable, the ugly beauti- 
ful, the insane sane, that he is the ally of 
Mammon or of any other devil. ^* Labor is 
an imprisoned god," writes' a penetrating 
observer, *' writhing evermore to escape from 
all shackles of sham, from -all corruptions of 
charlatanry, from all slavery of sin. Of the 
aspiring worker, he who looks up and not 
down, he who in reality is in coalition with 
God to make of earth's desert a veritable 
garden of the Lord, all good may be predi- 
cated. Li the Pauline thought we are labor- 
ers together with God when by noble pre- 
cept, by noble example, we teach all men 
that gross material values are not the essence 
of God's universe. Idleness in reality is a 
comprehensive term for falsity, for folly, for 
stupidity, for baseness, for poltroonery. We 
wholly misread the meaning of work when 
we fail to make it reKgious. Ethics have 



224 The Religion of a Person. 

for us no significance if our moral insigM 
does not realize itself in moral conduct, in 
moral creations. All doctrines of Theism are 
verbal jugglery if God does not realize Him- 
self in our workaday world as incarnate 
love, incarnate wisdom. Jean Ingelow saw 
clearly when she wrote, **Work is heaven's 
best : ' ' 

" Who care 
Only to quit a calling, will not make 
The calling what it might be; who despise 
Their work, Fate laughs at, and doth let the 

work 
Dull and degrade them." 

Life conceived in abstract terms is a ne- 
gation of the meaning of personal being. 
Life conceived in practical terms is the af- 
firmation of personal being. Our nature 
finds its fulfillment in service, in plain, pa- 
tient work. 

Our creation is our call to effort, to 
achievement. Dullness and degradation 
await us if we despise the divineness of our 
vocation. "Work is pur appreciation of the 



Work. 225 

order of life. Hence it proceeds from a 
depth of sentiment that is profoundly spir- 
itual. It is our assertion that the true man 
illustrates his place; that all labor, however 
trivial, may by thought and character be- 
come liberal; that in every event of life, de- 
spite its minuteness, there is a possible mag- 
nanimity. Upon the eye and ear of the 
churl, the social parasite, the perverter of 
life's high intent, in Jean Ingelow's phrase, 
** heaven's best," such appreciations find no 
room nor root. The trifler imagines great- 
ness of achievement entailed or organized in 
certain places or duties. It does not occur 
to his benighted understanding that pretense 
never brought to pass a lasting benefit, never 
gave to the world an immortal sentence. As 
Emerson writes: ''A fop may sit in any 
chair of the world, nor be distinguished for 
his hour from Homer and Washington; but 
there can never be any doubt concerning the 
respective ability of human beings when we 
seek the truth. Pretension may sit still, but 
can not act. Pretension never feigned an 
act of real greatness. Pretension never 
15 



226 The Religion of a Person. 

wrote an Iliad, nor drove back Xerxes, nor 
Christianized the world, nor abolished slav- 
ery. ' ' 

As an appreciation of the order of life, 
work affirms authority. 

n. 

And this authority is infinite. God as the 
"World Ground, the Fundamental Eeality, 
the Father of spirits, is the first, the per- 
ennial, the all-efficient Worker. In the begin- 
ning God created the heaven and the earth. 
Out of the formless and the void He brought 
form and substance. Eichest profusion in 
sky, in sea, in air, in forest dense, in desert 
waste is His handiwork. He climaxed all 
things within and under heaven's wide arch 
in the creation of man, His own Image, His 
own Likeness. 

Nor did His activity cease with the giving 
of the mysterious and aboriginal impulse to 
all organic and inorganic being. For it is 
God who even now commands the uprising 
and the downsetting of suns, who brings the 
wind out of the secret places, who weighs the 
dust of the earth in a measure, who makes 



WORK. 227 

the clouds His chariot, who clothes the val- 
leys with corn, the pastures with flocks, and 
opens His hand for the satisfying of the 
desire of every living thing, who holds each 
individual soul in life and suffers not our 
feet to be moved. So familiar is He with 
every finite soul that our diseases are the 
object of His healing, our cares the object of 
His solicitude, our sins the burden of His 
heart. In the most minute of senses God is 
the reliever of the oppressed, the father of 
the fatherless, the uplifter of the fallen, the 
helper of the needy, the seeker of the lost. 
God speaks to the world primarily in deeds. 
The Bible is for all men the vitalizing and 
regenerative book because of its self-realiza- 
tion in flesh and blood, in thought, in will, in 
feeling. As a book it admits of application 
to all the exigencies and every-day realities 
of human experience. It places no emphasis 
on abstraction. It gives no place to logic 
chopping. It is a book surcharged with the 
ruddy currents of salient life. It finds its 
highest warrant not in word, but in work; 
not in precept, but in performance. These 
theses find declaration in the evangelic rec- 



228 The Religion of a Person. 

ords : ' * The Word was made flesli and dwelt 
among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory 
as of the only begotten of Father, fnll of 
grace and truth;'' ^^In Him was life; and 
the life was the light of men;" **I am the 
Bread of life: he that cometh to Me shall 
never hunger;" ^^I am the Eesurrection and 
the Life : he that believeth in Me, though he 
were dead, yet shall he live ; " ^ ^ He that hath 
seen Me hath seen the Father;" *^I am the 
Good Shepherd; the Good Shepherd giveth 
His life for the sheep." Ethical order and 
spiritual beauty came to the world of men 
not through the manipulation of words, but 
through the medium of work. The Incarna- 
tion is God's present and perpetual protest 
against speech without service, against the- 
ory without practice. 

III. 

Work is our appreciation of the high 
origin of all sane and serviceable event. It 
is our repudiation of a mechanical world. It 
is our disbelief of all impersonal philoso- 
phies. It is our faith in God, the Infinite 
Worker, the Infinite Thinker, the Infinite 



Work. 229 

Helper. The worker wlio aspires to moral 
worth can not subscribe by virtue of his as- 
piration to the postulates of atheism. The 
enheartening word for the achieving soul is 
God. "Within the entire schedule and inven- 
tory of physical property and power the man 
of action discerns the causal efficiency of the 
Infinite Mind and Will. To indolence suc- 
cessive generations have easily traced an 
Iliad of irreparable woes. Indolence is our 
tacit consent to that atheistic doctrine which 
avers that the same uniformity of natural 
law effective in the creation of our com- 
plexion is effective in the fashioning of our 
character, that the same inviolable force 
bringing to pass an Asiatic typhoon brings 
to pass all social and religious progress. The 
trifler is the real unbeliever. He is the bur- 
lesquer of the high origin of the world. He 
makes all causal power a mechanical power, 
not a volitional one. With Professor Huxley, 
who said, **A11 of our philosophy, all of our 
poetry, all of our science, all of our art, Plato, 
Shakespeare, Newton, and Raphael, are po- 
tential in the fires of the sun,'' the sluggard 
is in cordial agreement. The worker enters 



230 The Religion of a Person. 

a vigorous and effectual objection to even a 
momentary consideration of * ' the fires of the 
sun'' as his progenitor or as his peer. The 
champions of the primal quality of water, or 
of fire, or of earth, or of number find in the 
man of work, the bringer-to-pass, a foe of the 
invincible temper. Thomas Carlyle became 
the mouthpiece for legitimate thought in his 
wise words: *^Work is the making of mad- 
ness sane; Properly thou hast no other 
knowledge but what thou hast got by work- 
ing ; the rest is yet all a hypothesis of knowl- 
edge, a thing to be argued of in schools, a 
thing floating in the clouds, in endless logic 
vortices, till we try and ^x it. Doubt of 
whatever kind can be ended by Action 
alone." As thought is an abstraction save 
as it realizes itself in experience, so faith is 
dead, as the apostle avows, only as it realizes 
itself in practical worth. The Mohammedan 
dervish and Hindoo fakir are caught up into 
pure ether apparently through their exceed- 
ing prayerf nines s, but their ecstasies are 
without a helpful end. Their devotions do 
not concrete themselves in things honest, 
true, just, pure, lovely, and of good report. 



Work. 231 

Of the form of godliness they possess an 
overflowing sufficiency, bnt of the dynamics 
of godliness they are lamentably deficient. 
The Christian world has had its full share of 
deluded professors. The anchorite, taking 
up his abode in Syrian deserts or in Alpine 
fastnesses, spending dreary days and long- 
drawn-out nights in fasting and prayer, while 
corruption held undisputed sway in Ephesus, 
in Jerusalem, in Corinth, in Eome, uncon- 
sciously promoted a philosophic and religious 
chaos throughout the world. The gospel of 
Jesus Christ is grievously burdened within 
whatever parallels by the man of words 
minus work. The thirteenth century inquisi- 
tors were deluded as the propagandists of 
the Christian faith, but not less so were the 
Antinomians of the sixteenth century. On 
the divine side of the Christian religion, **by 
grace are we saved through faith; and that 
not of ourselves it is the gift of God," while 
on the human side ** every man shall be re- 
warded according to his works." It is not 
enough that God works in us both to will and 
to do of His good pleasure. "We ourselves 
are charged with the responsible function of 



232 The Religion of a Person. 

working out our own salvation with fear and 
trembling. Ethics is the coinage of an over- 
wrought brain, a veritable bodiless creation, 
when considered either as mere insight or 
mere conduct, mere material rightness or 
mere formal rightness. In like fashion the 
doctrine of God as pure being or as im- 
personal force is the very cancellation of 
sound thinking and practical living. Man 
saved by the grace of God forfeits his sal- 
vation if unwilling to make it practical. The 
professed believer in the gospel of Jesus 
Christ becomes the most rancorous of unbe- 
lievers, save as he communicates his faith to 
others. Eeligion is a fiction, *^ stale, flat, un- 
profitable," ^*a pestilent congregation of 
vapors," a ** sound and fury signifying noth- 
ing" only as moral insight becomes moral 
conduct, as duty realizes itself in outward 
fortune and happiness. Doctrines must es- 
tablish their efficiency or be relegated to 
the land of the Lotus Eaters. It is the crown- 
ing distinction of God's "Word that it admits 
of conversion into fact everywhither. The 
sane worker thus becomes the interpreter of 
life. He alone tells the whence of life, and 



Work. 233 

he alone tells the whither to any appreciable 
extent whatever. 

IV. 

Work is the world ^s renewer. **Man, son 
of earth and of heaven/' inquires the Chel- 
sean sage, ^4ies there not in the innermost 
heart of thee a spirit of active method, a 
force for work; — and bums like a painfully 
smoldering fire, giving thee no rest till thou 
unfold it, till thou write it down in beneficent 
facts around thee? What is immethodic 
waste, thou shalt make methodic, regulated, 
arable, obedient, and productive to thee. 
Wheresoever thou findest disorder there is 
thy eternal enemy; attack him swiftly, sub- 
due him; make order of him, the subject not 
of Chaos, but of Intelligence, Divinity, and 
Thee!'' The spirit must be perpetually as- 
sertive in every sphere of being if the world 
is to be preserved from an unspeakable 
brutishness and desolation. The differenti- 
ating principle between man and all the in- 
ferior economies of animal life is the power 
of man to bring the methodic out of the im- 
methodic, to banish the reign of Nox and in- 



234 The Religion of a Person, 

voke Day, to transmute the waste into the 
arable, to bring disorder into subjection, to 
renew the face of the earth in righteousness 
and true holiness. In the light of this differ- 
entiating principle the one monster of the 
world, the one travesty upon humankind, is 
the man of no work. His theses are : There 
is no immethodic to make methodic, there is 
no oppressive Night to be succeeded by genial 
Day, there is no waste to make arable, there 
is no disorder to subject, there is no sensible 
world to be renewed in righteousness and 
true holiness. The achieving man does not 
find the world as an organ too convex or too 
concave for the putting forth of his genius. 
He readily finds a focal distance within the 
actual horizon of human life. He does not 
impeach the wisdom which fashioned this 
present world. He does not lapse into 
apathy because of temperatures too cold or 
too hot. He does not suffer himself to be 
taken captive by supineness if an equilibrium 
of thought and thing is not hastily found. 
He profoundly believes that all chaos has 
within it a latent cosmos, that all bane has 
in it the possibility of blessing, that out of 



Work. 235 

the habitats of ''hydras and chimeras dire'' 
angelic ministrants may find their way. The 
doer is the true Thanmatnrgus. This title 
was misappropriated when assigned by me- 
diaeval Eomanists to a St. Anthony or St. 
Francis or St. Patrick, who blinded the eyes 
of the credulous through their jugglery with 
bones or blood or bread. The miracle-worker 
is he who is up and doing. He wields the 
wand of intelligent effort, and cities, com- 
monwealths and republics, churches, schools 
and philanthropies spring into being full 
panoplied. He speaks and acts, and at once 
the sleeping energies of land and water be- 
stir themselves like fabled giants. The 
steamship and railway declare the invalidity 
of space and time ; while the plow-point, the 
automatic sower of seed and reaper of har- 
vests, the telephone and telegraph affirm the 
practical ubiquity of the finite mind and will. 
Man the worker is the true vicegerent of 
God the Worker. An extraordinary signifi- 
cance is in the word of Jesus: '^Ye are My 
friends if ye do whatsoever I command you ;' ' 
* ' Son, go worli to-day in My vineyard. ' ' And 
a like significance attaches itself to the 



1536 The Religion of a Person. 

Pauline word, **We are laborers together 
with God.'' Pseudo religions have split on 
this rock. Their doctrines are not adequate 
to the demands made upon them by the com- 
plex interactions of individual and social life. 
As finely spun abstractions they find a hos- 
pitable lodging in inert souls. Heathenism 
stands abashed in the presence of all limita- 
tion and malfeasance, whether of thought or 
thing. It is not a renewer. It is not a 
worker. It sees men and things as brute 
atoms, but as nothing beyond. All votaries 
of Brahminism, of Mohammedanism, of Con- 
fucianism, and of quasi-religions are in the 
mass animalistic, are pre-eminently in the 
mental and moral pupilage peiiod, and fa- 
miliarly allied with the tiger and the ape. In 
all speculation heathenism gives emphasis 
to being without self-realization. The prin- 
ciples that underlie our mental and moral 
selfhood, the heathen devotee vainly imagines 
to be existent separate and apart from our 
workaday experience. The practical side of 
life he does not appraise. Indeed all heathen 
civilization is a negation of thought, of will, 
of feeling expressed in terms of universal 



WORK. 237 

efficiency. "Work is the man giving to his 
thinking, to his willing, to his feeling an un- 
limited beneficence. It is our selfhood in- 
tegrated. It is the ascendancy of personality 
over all things else. The transmutations ef- 
fected by the forth-going of divine energy 
in the working up of every shred, and ort, 
and end, into creations of onyx and pearl, of 
iron and gold, of chrysanthemum and mag- 
nolia, of oriole and meadow-lark, of beast 
and physical man, find their analogy in the 
transmutations wrought by Eobert Fulton, 
by Samuel Morse, by Cyrus W. Field, by 
Elias Howe, by Luther Burbank, by Thomas 
Edison, and by all other workers together 
with God in every conceivable sphere of le- 
gitimate service. 

The worker believes profoundly in the 
good intents of the universe. He is con- 
vinced that *^the goodness of God endureth 
continually.'' But the acrid fool sees noth- 
ing of wisdom or of goodness in the tug of 
gravitation, in the repulsions and attractions 
of forces chemical and physical, in the un- 
failing operation of causes material, causes 
mental, causes moral. It is, on the other 



238 The Religion of a Person. 

hand, the crowning distinction of Christian- 
ity that it establishes its word through its 
work, that every doctrine which it promul- 
gates finds an invincible completion in deed. 
^^The knowledge," exclaims a latter-day 
seer, *^that will hold good in working, cleave 
thou to that; for Nature herself accredits 
that, says Yea to that. Properly thou hast 
no other knowledge but what thou hast got 
by worldng; the rest is yet all a hypothesis 
of knowledge, a thing floating in the clouds 
in endless logic vortices, till we try it and 
fix it." St. Paul spoke the universal word 
when he wrote to the Eoman believers, ^ ^ I am 
not ashamed of the gospel of Christ; for it 
is the power of God unto salvation to every 
one that believeth." A paraphrase fully 
warranted by individual and social experi- 
ence would be of the following order: I am 
not in any sense abashed in my acceptance 
of the gospel of Christ; for I have fully dem- 
onstrated to my own satisfaction, and others 
have done likewise, that the application of 
its doctrines to human necessity is wholly ef- 
fective. The postulates of the Kingdom of 
God are workable both in speculation and in 



WORK. 239 

practice. For this reason they are dynamic 
in the full significance of that term. From 
the day of their first propagation to the pres- 
ent they have accredited themselves through 
their helpful and sanative efficiency despite 
condition or circumstance. Hence, in Shake- 
spearean phrase, the Christian reasons: 

"What is a man 
If his chief good and market of his time 
Be but to sleep and feed ? A beast, no more. 
Sure, He that made us with such large discourse, 
Looking before and after, gave us not 
That capability and godlike reason 
To mold in us unused." 

V. 

"Work is the repudiation of sense finality. 
The man of action must be a thinker if his 
action is to have within it an abiding quality. 
All completed thought is affirmative of the pri- 
macy of spirit. All work, likewise, affirms the 
primacy of spirit. It is a denial in Jovian 
thunder of the validity of John Locke's sen- 
sational philosophy, of Herbert Spencer's 
crude phenomenalism, of David Hume's faint 
and vivid impressions. The worker inaugu- 
rates. He imposes upon pig iron the regu- 



240 The Religion of a Person. 

lative ideas of Ms mental life, and produces 
the steel rail and the watch spring. He ad- 
vances through the causal force of his will 
upon granite and clay deposits, and converts 
them into structures fit for habitation, for 
commerce, for industry, for education, for 
worship. The pigment of dullest aspect he 
metamorphoses into the image of the win- 
some Christ-child, the reed by the water- 
course he transforms into the mellifluence of 
the piccolo, and the intuitions of moral self- 
hood he fashions into republics and ecclesi- 
astical bodies. He works upon all forms of 
life, organic and inorganic. They do not 
work upon him. All work that is of wis- 
dom's way is constitutive, synthetic, analytic. 

" By things which do appear 
We judge amiss. The flower which wears its way 
Through stony chinks, lives on from day to day 
Approved for living, — let the rest be gay 
And sweet as summer! Heaven within the reed 
Lists for the flute note; in the folded seed 
It sees the bud, and in the Will the Deed." 

The impressiveness of mere living from 
day to day is not the characteristic of man 
conscious, man determining, man thinking. 



WORK. 241 

But the achievement which elicits from the 
reed the flute note, which espies the bud in 
the folded seed, and from the Will evokes the 
Deed, is the characteristic of man in his best 
estate, of man in his supremacy over the 
trinity of unbelief, matter, force, and motion. 
He who embodies inertness finds it not diffi- 
cult to conclude that the mind is indeed a 
tabula rasa, a series of conscious states that 
fluctuate with excited nerve-centers, a heap 
of impressions varying from the vividness 
of an ocean tempest to the faintness of a 
baby's laughter. But the doer of deeds sub- 
scribes to no such doctrine. The firstness of 
the soul is the lesson of all life. And no 
man is more cognizant of this transcendent 
fact than he who produces. The primacy of 
matter, force, and motion is the jest of all 
practical endeavor and is travestied by all 
conclusions of ultimate thinking. It is the 
poltroon and the perverter, the comedian and 
the corrupter who give to the senses the place 
of Deity. Beyond the realm of the visible, 
audible, tangible, sensible they do not go. 
For them the world inclusive of mind and 
matter is an impersonal world. The man of 

16 



242 The Religion of a Person, 

action, however, protests against himself be- 
ing viewed in the light of a good wheel or 
an effective pin. His perennial avowal is: 
I am, I persist, I initiate, I conclude, I think, 
I feel. In itself the world of sight, of sound, 
of taste, of touch, of smell is pure fantasy. 
It begins, it continues, and it ends with the 
activity and freedom of personality, Infinite 
and finite. Its function is symbolic. In this 
subaltern capacity all sensuous eixistence pos- 
sesses a cosmic beauty and beneficence. In 
any other capacity it is **rank and smells 
to heaven. ' ' In all effect the worker discerns 
intelligence free and purposive. He sees 
that law, not luck, governs the movement of 
motes as truly as it insures the foundations 
of the earth. He sees that the sowing and 
reaping of a wise Dakota wheat farmer is 
a strict analogy of the sowing and reaping 
in the character of Abraham Lincoln. Across 
all apparent distracting forces he beholds 
the integration of personality. The brutality 
of Eichard III, the lechery of Abdul Hamid, 
the treachery of Judas Iscariot do not con- 
vince him of the premiership of the senses 
in the realm of morals. Nor is he led to be- 



Work. 243 

lieve in the absenteeism of God because of 
the destructive Asiatic typhoon or of the 
withering rays of an equatorial sun. His in- 
sistence is that life is an entirety ; that in in- 
tellection or in volition or in affection life is 
not bounded by space or time ; that it is not 
subject to the mutations of matter; that the 
inductive causality, known as physical, chem- 
ical, or meehanical force, is utterly invalid 
within the realm of personality. Because of 
these propositions, demonstrated as they are 
in thought and in experience, the animalism 
of Eichard III and Abdul Hamid, the treach- 
ery of Judas Iscariot begotten by criminal 
greed, are repudiations rather than the es- 
tablishment of personality, and hence can 
have no other issue but that of Scriptural 
description, ^^ outer darkness,'^ ^^ weeping 
and gnashing of teeth." God present now 
and evermore, is the sure and firm-set faith 
of the bringer-to-pass. The absenteeism of 
God from anv arena or nook of the universe 
is a speculative figTaent. His omni-presence, 
His omni-power, His omni-love are the log- 
ical and ethical certainties of all thought ca- 
pable of practical expression. 



244 The Religion of a Person. 

VI. 

The philosopher who affirmed, *^ Properly 
speaking, all true Work is Religion, and 
whatsoever Religion is not Work may go and 
dwell among the Brahmins, Antinomians, 
Spinning Dervishes, or where it will, for with 
me it shall have no harbor," gave repetition 
to the practicalness of the revealed word of 
the Kingdom: **Thoii believest that there is 
one God ; thou doest well : the devils also be- 
lieve and tremble. But wilt thou know, 0, 
vain man, that faith without works is dead?" 
Lights shining in a dark place, true setters- 
f orth of the Kingdom of God were the medi- 
aeval monks who averred, Labor are est or are 
— *^To labor is to pray." The Gospel of 
Work is the oldest of Gospels. Anterior to 
pen or quill or stylus, to book or parchment 
or stone, the Gospel of Work avowed itself. 
It was an avowal in the innermost selfhood 
of God and man. Heart, brain, and brawn 
knew of the sweat, inner and outer, sequent 
to sore labor, prior to all preachings and 
parley, to all language and logic. Before all 
verbal revelation God, the Primal Worker, 
out of the formless and the void fashioned 



WORK. 245 

the heaven and the earth, making of things 
celestial and terrestrial the subjects not of 
Chaos but of Intelligence, not of Darkness 
but of Light, not of Demonism but of Di- 
vinity. Antedating hieroglyphs, characters, 
alphabets, man travailed in soul and body 
for the bringing in of the methodic out of 
the immethodic, the arable out of the waste, 
the thing out of the no-thing, the sane out 
of the mad. The true worker is the embodi- 
ment of verities descending out of heaven 
from God. He roots himself in the right- 
eousness that was before the morning stars 
sang together or e'er the sons of God shouted 
for joy. He is a man of substance. He is 
the abhorrer of semblance. He is the cham- 
pion and the incarnation of universal judg- 
ments. To all appearance he applies the 
principles that obtain in abiding realities. 
He is the wielder of a spear more acute than 
that of Milton's Ithuriel in the detection of 
specious falsity. Shams, whether speculative 
or experiential, are readily exposed by his 
pungent thinking and doing. Life he inter- 
prets in terms sacred and potential. Some- 
thing of divineness he espies in all true serv- 



246 The Religion of a Person. 

ice. Labor, wide as the earth, he discerns, 
has its summit in the heavenlies. In the 
sweat, whether of brow, of brain, or of heart, 
he beholds a kinship more binding than that 
of bonds consangnineons. Between the 
breaker-up of the fallow ground and the 
transformer of barbarous Jutes, Angles, 
Danes, and Celts into the world ^s greatest 
ethical and political empire he is cognizant 
of an indissoluble fraternity. Between the 
mechanical genius who binds with rails of 
steel and cords of copper the frozen parallels 
of the north to the ambrosial latitudes of the 
south, and the framer of constitutions eccle- 
siastical and governmental, the man of sub- 
stance perceives a homogeneity, the first and 
final function of which is the glorification of 
God throughout the earth. 

The worker takes counsel with the Un- 
seen. He endures as seeing Him who is in- 
visible. His working formulae are: All real 
vi'sibility is begotten by the Invisible; All 
real audibleness is the generation of the In- 
audible; All real tangibleness is the off- 
spring of the Intangible. In a word, the 
worker's faith finds a summary in the Paul- 



Work. 247 

ine assurance, **In Him we live, and move, 
and have our being.'' 

With Jean Ingelow the worker exclaims, 
**Work is its own best earthy meed." With 
Milton he believes — 

" Man hath his daily work of body or mind 
Appointed, which declares his dignity 
And the regard of Heaven in all his ways." 

In Emerson he finds a fellowship of thought : 
* ' Every man 's task is his life-preserver. The 
conviction that his work is dear to God and 
can not be spared, defends him." His 
brother-man, the worker, enheartens, in the 
melodic and tonic speech of Elizabeth Bar- 
rett Browning: 

" Get leave to work 
In this world ! — 't is the best you get at all ! 
For God in cursing, gives us better gifts 
Than men in benediction. God says. Sweat 
For foreheads, — men say. Crowns — and so we are 

crowned. 
Ay, gashed — ^by some tormenting circle of steel 
Which snaps with a secret spring, — Get work! 

get work! 
Be sure 't is better than what you work to get ! " 



Chapter VIII. 
PRAYER. 



O mighty love! Man is one world and hath 

Another to attend him. 

Since then, my God, Thou hast 

So brave a palace built, O dwell in it, 

That it may dwell with Thee at last! 

Till then afford us so much wit, 

That as the world serves us, we may serve Thee, 

And both Thy seirvants be. 

—GEORGE HERBERT. 

The Creator, the great God, is our unchangeable 
and Almighty Friend, and He is causing all things, 
however confused and untoward they may seem, to 
work together for our highest good. Nothing, whether 
it be things present, or things to come, or life or death, 
can pluck us out of His hand or thwart His loving 
will. —BORDEN P. BOWNE. 



PRAYER. 

I. 

If the world in which we are, is capable 
of an interpretation other than as a system 
of unconscious forces, a material world per 
se, a brute fact, a congeries of non-intelligent, 
non-willing, non-sentient elements, then the 
function of prayer is dynamic beyond all con- 
ceivable controversy. The whole range of 
speculative thinking and practical energy 
finds itself fronting a crux in the one query, 
Is the universe personal or impersonal? If 
it is impersonal, all thought collapses, and 
speculatively we wander in an endless re- 
gress. If it is impersonal, freedom becomes 
a mischievous chimera and all sense of re- 
sponsibility disappears. If it is impersonal, 
reason becomes a verbal counter and all en- 
deavor to give systematic interpretation to 
thought and thing, to purpose and perform- 
ance is a veritable beating of the air, a pur- 
suit of an ignis fatuus. But with profound 

251 



252 The Religion of a Person. 

gratitude for the construction of life as it 
is, we find all legitimate thought affirming 
the supremacy of the personal. The specu- 
lative can not supersede the practical. The 
letter can not subordinate the spirit. Hence 
no amount of syllogistic wisdom has yet suc- 
ceeded in making the practical world an un- 
conscious, non-thinking, non-purposive world. 
This fact makes of prayer a moving force. 

Prayer is the fellowship of the finite per- 
sonality with the Infinite Personality. It is 
the communion of the child with his Father, 
of the disciple with his Master, of the serv- 
ant with his Lord. It is the entreaty of the 
helpless for help; of the sinner for pardon, 
for peace ; of the child for his Father 's pres- 
ence. It is the normal and perennial utter- 
ance of a heart sincere and ever seeking 
sincerity, of a heart loving and ever seeking 
love, of a mind, a will in agreement with 
God and ever seeking agreement. It is life 
aspiring to the high levels of the whole will 
of God. To employ Browning's phrase, *4t 
is the stoop of the soul;" **it is man's noth- 
ing perfect submitting to God's all com- 
plete;" **it is our obeisance in spirit which 



Prayer. 253 

climbs to His feetJ' The philosophy which 
looks npon man as mere physical product, 
that sees in the mental and moral life noth- 
ing more than the subjective aspect of ma- 
terial force, that declares all human deter- 
mination to be only a mode of operation of 
persistent energy, of necessity finds no value 
whatsoever in prayer. It is a jugglery of 
words to make mention of fellowship, of 
communion, of entreaty, of aspiration, if 
man is not the responsible shaper of his own 
destiny, if he is nothing beyond the charac- 
terization of the French Realists, **La Bete 
Humaine. ' ' 

The postulates of Materialism, fortu- 
nately for the race, can not withstand the 
antagonisms of a rational idealism, of an 
ethical practice. Rational idealism, everyday 
ethics, stress continually the premiership of 
personality. They affirm God to be the 
World Ground, the Basal Reality, the Maker 
of heaven and of earth, the Father of mer- 
cies, the Wisdom, the Righteousness, the 
Sanctification, the Redemption of all men. 
Rational idealism, workable morals, avow 
without ceasing God's immanence in all life 



254 The Religion of a Person. 

and His transcendence of all life. All sane 
pliilosophy coincides with sane living in es- 
tablishing a wide divergence between virtue 
and vice, between reason and non-reason. 
Theory and practice are meaningless if not 
mutually inclusive and mutually helpful. 
Our logic and our life must embrace each 
other, must reinforce each other. Good 
sense vehemently renounces the conclusion 
of Eenan, which originated in the French en- 
cyclopedist's repudiation of religion as ex- 
pressed in his ^^ Souvenirs:" ** After leaving 
the seminary I continued to live chastely, as 
I had done in the preceding years. But later 
I saw the vanity of that virtue as of all other 
virtues. I recognized in particular that Na- 
ture cares not whether a man is chaste or 
not. I can not rid myself of the idea that, 
after all, it is perhaps the libertine who is 
right and who practices the true philosophy 
of life. ' ' Matthew Arnold comments thus on 
the fallacy of Eenan : ^ 'Instead of saying that 
Nature cares nothing about chastity, let us 
say that human nature, our nature, cares 
about it a great deal." A personal universe 
is a moral universe. It can not be otherwise 



Prayer. 255 

and remain personal. Despite his specula- 
tions, no man can disregard moral restriction 
with impunity. He finds himself speedily to 
be a f oreignism in nature. The stars in their 
courses fight against him, the stones in the 
field hold not their peace, and the whirlwind 
is the invariable reaping of the sown wind. 
Eegardless of Eenan and his encyclopedic 
philosophy, nature, human and otherwise, 
cares tremendously whether we do or do not 
value ethical insight, rational conduct. The 
laws that underlie our personal life are in- 
finitely greater than social custom, as David 
Hume in his philosophy would have us be- 
lieve. They are the very knitting and con- 
texture of all individual and community de- 
velopment. 

11. 

Prayer is therefore our appreciation of 
the divine ilnmanence. It is our abiding 
confidence that the world is a thought-world, 
a world of will, a world of feeling. It is 
a denial of the assumptions of Professor 
Huxley in his lecture, *^ Evolution and 
Ethics:" ** Cosmic nature is no school of vir- 



256 The Religion of a Person. 

tue, but the headquarters of the enemy of 
ethical nature." *^The practice of what is 
ethically best — ^what we call goodness, or vir- 
tue — ^involves a course of conduct which in 
all respects is opposed to that which leads to 
success in the cosmic struggle for existence. '^ 
*^Laws and moral precepts are directed to 
the end of curbing the cosmic process. 
Social progress means a checking of the cos- 
mic process at every step and the substitu- 
tion for it of another, which may be called 
the ethical progress." **Let us understand, 
once for all, that the ethical progress of so- 
ciety depends not on initiating the cosmic 
process, still less in running away from it, 
but in combating it." 

Professor Huxley's philosophy is the ne- 
gation of God in every sphere of being ex- 
clusive of the ethical. It is the repudiation 
of the divine immanence in things physical. 
It is the most palpable erection of physical 
nature into a self-enclosed, independent sys- 
tem. It is the creation of an impossible gulf 
between the thought-world and the 'thing- 
world; between the uniformity of the nat- 
ural world and the self-determinations of the 



Prayer. 257 

tMnking, conscious man. It is the alignment 
of all physical being and all physical energy 
in opposition to all social and moral being, 
to all social and moral energy. The universe 
becomes a ludicrous spectacle indeed if God, 
the World Ground, the Maker and Preserver 
of all things, the Father of all spirits, sets 
Himself in the lower economies of being in 
ceaseless opposition to the higher economies 
of being. Such contraventions, however, are 
not evident in every-day experience. The 
tiller of the soil working in conjunction with 
physical law finds himself the recipient of the 
plenty of Cornucopia. The skilled seaman 
sets sail upon the fathomless depths of crys- 
tal, knowing that between himself and the 
winds, the sun, the moon, the sea, and all 
mechanical forces a cordial amity exists. 
The worker in steel, in stone, in wood sees 
not an inplacable foe in the indurated sur- 
face, but himself in form of house, of steam- 
ship, of locomotive, of plow-point. The cos- 
mic process has nothing of terror in it for 
the healthy mind and heart. It is indeed our 
otherness in lower form clamoring for a self- 
hood in the upper ranges of being. The civ- 
17 



258 The Religion of a Person. 

ilization that is worthy of the designation is 
the transformation of things into thoughts, 
of thoughts into ethical insight, into ethical 
conduct. A stem ethics in strictest reality- 
sparkles upon the edge of chisels, in the 
whirring wheels of the factory, in the keen 
point of the plow, in the golden berry of the 
wheat-stalk, in the silvery product of the 
sugar-cane, in the corner-stone of the cathe- 
dral, in the radiant face of the newly-coined 
dollar. A conscious attempt to eliminate 
ethics from physical being means for us phys- 
ical, mental, and moral disaster. The phys- 
ical universe is not a thing apart. It is the 
visualizing, the making tangible, the making 
audible of thought, will, emotion. It is God 
manifesting Himself. It is man co-operating 
with God. Cosmic nature, independent of 
personality and all that personality implies, 
is pure invention. A personal world allows 
no place for a non-moral, non-spiritual world 
on which human experience is incongruously 
superinduced. A cosmic struggle for exist- 
ence fundamentally non-ethical is a degrada- 
tion of the Causal Power which gives life and 
movement to the cosmos. We can not legiti- 



Prayer. 259 

mately conceive of God as a contradiction, 
but a non-moral, non-spiritual cosmic strug- 
gle would make Him the most extraordinary 
of contradictions. What we discover true 
for ourselves in our use of the physical world 
finds its highest and eternal application in 
God. The immanent God is the fact of facts. 
He is everywhere or He is nowhere. Hence 
Professor Huxley's ** school of virtue'' must 
have its being in the lowest economy of life 
as truly as in the highest kingdom. It is not 
within the province of moons or mud banks, 
mountains or mastodons, chemistry or cor- 
morants to make of the life of the spirit an 
impertinence or an injury. The sanity and 
majesty of the soul can not be conspired 
against by inferior orders of creation. The 
assumption is far wiser that all things and 
all thoughts are under the dominance of per- 
sonality, and if this dominance is marked by 
wisdom then are they cheerful apologues, 
parables of our being and of our becoming. 
The divine immanence dissolves all physical 
being in the resistless menstruum of thought 
and will. The voice of God communicates all 
things. It fills the world. The hand of God 



260 The Religion of a Person. 

bestows all tMngs. It scatters lavishly suns, 
stars, seas, continents, beasts, birds, fruits, 
flowers, and finite souls. In and tbrough Him 
we and all creation live, move, and have our 
being. 

The revealed Kingdom of God avows con- 
tinuously that ' ' cosmic nature ' * by virtue of 
the immanence of God in all life is ^Hhe 
school of virtue.'^ It establishes no point of 
difference between the welfare of the body 
and the welfare of the spirit. It does not 
af&rm God in thought and deny His presence 
in thing. It does not assert the sphere of 
morals to be differentiated from the sphere 
of matter. It does not declare God to be 
present in the aspirations of a saint and ab- 
sent in the heavings to and fro of mighty 
waters. Eather the word of Eevelation is, 
**He laid the foundations of the earth, that 
it should not be removed forever;" ^^He 
covers Himself with light as with a gar- 
ment;" **He stretcheth out the heavens like 
a curtain;" **He layeth the beams of His 
chambers in the waters;" ^*He maketh the 
clouds His chariot;" ^'He walketh upon the 
wings of the wind;" ^^He giveth snow like 



Prayer. 261 

wool;" ^^He scattereth the hoarf roast like 
ashes ; " * * He casteth forth His ice like mor- 
sels ;'' ^^He looketh on the earth, and it trem- 
bles;'' **He touches the hills, and they 
smoke;" *^He sendeth forth His spirit, and 
all creatures are created;" ^^He hideth His 
face, and they are troubled;" **He taketh 
away their breath, they die, and return to 
their dust;" *^He is before all things, and 
by Him all things consist;" *'We know that 
all things work together for good to them 
that love God;" *^What shall separate us 
from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation or 
distress, or persecution, or famine, or naked- 
ness, or peril, or sword? . . . Nay, in all 
these things we are more than conquerors 
through Him that loved us. For I am per- 
suaded that neither death nor life, nor an- 
gels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor 
things present^ nor things to come, nor 
height, nor depth, nor any other created thing 
shall be able to separate us from the love of 
God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. ' ' It 
is a philosophy purely deistic that would tie 
the hand of God in the physical kingdom and 
give to Him an uttermost liberty in the moral 



262 The Religion of a Person. 

kingdom; that would convert Him into an 
idle spectator in one sphere of His creation 
and make of Him a prodigious worker in 
another sphere. Prayer is therefore philo- 
sophic, after the manner of a sane philoso- 
phy, as an appreciation of God's immediate- 
ness and efficiency in every conceivable realm 
of being. 

The Pauline exhortations have thus a 
validity that is transcendently removed from 
the arbitrary, the ipse dixit ^ the dogmatic. 

* ^ Pray without ceasing ; * ' ^ ^ In everything by 
prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, 
let your requests be made known unto God;" 

* ^ Praying always with all prayer and suppli- 
cation in the spirit," are ultimates of a sound 
and practical philosophy. 

"Prayer is 
The world in tune, 
A spirit voice. 
And vocal joys, 
Whose echo is heaven's bliss.** 

III. 

Prayer is not only our appreciation of 
God as immanent in our finite life, but is 



Prayer. 263 

also an appreciation of God in His tran- 
scendence of all finite life. Condillac, tlie 
French materialist, emitted nothing more 
than the fitful light of a firefly when he wrote, 
** Though we should pierce the heavens, 
though we should sink into the abyss, we 
never go out of ourselves; it is always our 
own thought that we perceive. ' ' Such a dic- 
tum is in accord with the reply of an editor 
of a leading Paris journal, to whom Paul 
Leroux offered his article **Dieu:" La ques- 
tion de Dieu manque d'actualite — *^The ques- 
tion of God is lacking of actuality. ' ' But the 
fact confronts us that in denying actuality 
to God we are also denying actuality to our- 
selves. In denying transcendence to God we 
are making of all life a closed circuit, begin- 
ning and ending in the ignorance, the folly, 
the limitations of ourselves. It is picture- 
thinking alone which makes of God an in- 
ferior member of His creation. The French 
philosophy of the eighteenth centur}^, of 
which Condillac was a distinguished expo- 
nent, gave to the imaginative faculty, rather 
than to the rational faculty, the place of pri- 
macy. Only that, they substantially declared, 



264 The Religion of a Person. 

wMcli comes before tlie image-making faculty 
is entitled to be called knowledge. The nn- 
picturable notions of intelligence bad for 
tbem no fundamental value. Sucb a pbiloso- 
pby found no difficulty in escorting God to 
tbe precipitous edges of the universe and ef- 
fectually disposing of Him. But sucli doc- 
trines of knowledge dispose of ourselves as 
readily as tbey dispose of God. Prof. B. P. 
Bowne in bis ^^Personalism'^ wisely answers 
all pbilosopby tbat is in bondage to sensuous 
experience, that insists upon picture-making 
in the realm of personality: *^ First of all/* 
be affirms, *^we ourselves are invisible. The 
physical organism is only an instrument for 
expressing and manifesting the inner life, but 
tbe living self is never seen. For each per- 
son his own self is known in immediate expe- 
rience, and all others are known through 
their effects. They are not revealed in form 
or shape, but in deeds, and they are known 
only in and through deeds. In this respect 
they are as formless and invisible as God 
Himself, and that not merely in the sense of 
being out of sight, but also in the sense of 
not lying within the sphere of visibility in 



Prayer. 265 

any way. What is the shape of the spirit? 
Or, what the length and breadth of the soul? 
These questions reveal the absurdity of the 
notion without criticism. ' ' In the last analy- 
sis it is self-centredism which lies at the root 
of all disbelief in the divine transcendence. 
A brief review of familiar arguments as to 
the priority of the invisible, the supremacy 
of personality, will perhaps clarify our con- 
ception of the divine nature as the fullness 
and overfullness of all life. The most public 
events of our life have their key and their 
meaning only in the unseen. The practical 
application of the laws of mechanics to the 
men and women whom we meet on the streets, 
to the exclusion of all other laws, would con- 
vert them into laughable pantomimes. A 
Punch-and-Judy exhibition is a thing of 
tameness compared to a mere mechanical ex- 
hibition and interpretation of a city-street 
crowd. It is purpose, it is thought, it is love, 
it is freedom, it is culture, it is faith which 
makes the hurrying feet, the eager hand, the 
anxious eye of moving men and women sub- 
lime. Human forms as objects in space 
apart from the manifold meaning of person- 



266 The Religion of a Person. 

ality have for us no beauty or attraction. 
To describe them as bones, nerve vesicles, 
muscles, red and white corpuscles, bands and 
feet, eyes and ears, awakens no enthusiasm 
within us. Their charm and their value are 
rooted in their personal character. And this 
character transcends all space by virtue of 
the non-spatiality of thought, of love, of 
freedom, of culture, of faith. No lover of 
books ever found literature within the walls 
of a library. To the unthinking mind Brown- 
ing, Lowell, Milton are as securely locked, 
even though their pages are open, as if they 
were in the subterranean chambers of a Mus- 
covite prison. Literature exists only in the 
invisible, non-spatial world of ideas and con- 
sciousness. The history of the human race 
has no existence in mere space. All that 
space holds is material integrations and dis- 
integrations, forces static and dynamic. The 
inner life of Charles Martel, Julius Caesar, 
Edmund Burke, Jerome of Prague, Charles 
Wesley, William Lloyd Garrison, Abraham 
Lincoln, and of souls of kindred nature, 
which alone makes human history, is wholly 
invisible. 



Prayer 267 

The great drama of life with its aspira- 
tions, its inspirations, its loves, its hates, its 
ideas, is foreign to space. He who seeks to 
discover in space its entrances and exits pur- 
sues a will-of-the-wisp. The unseen is the 
dwelling-place of human history. And the 
same is true of government. The British 
House of Parliament, the American Capitol, 
the Massachusetts or Ohio State Houses, the 
Philadelphia City Hall do not hold any form 
or feature of government. A relation of per- 
sonal wills with their background of affection, 
of ideas, of purposes consciously known, con- 
stitutes government. The real battlefields 
are in the man, not at Gettysburg, not at Se- 
dan, nor at Bunker Hill. The real Declaration 
of Independence was in Thomas Jefferson, in 
Eichard Henry Lee, in Benjamin Franklin, 
in John Adams, and in other loyal-hearted 
Colonists. No amount of searching could 
have discovered it in the letters, on the paper, 
or in the ink of the document. All life that 
is purposive, thoughtful, emotional, causal, 
intensive, finds its seat in the conscious 
man, and not in his blood, nor in his bones, 
nor within the confines of a house or a hemi- 



268 The Religion of a Person. 

sphere. In fact space and time, matter, force, 
and physical motion are but data of the think- 
ing, determining, acting self. Their function 
first and last is to symbolize the efficiency of 
personality. Man is the inhabitant of an in- 
visible, not a visible, world ; and what of his 
potencies and purposes we see, designated as 
London, Johannesburg, Yokohama, Manila, 
Chicago, Cunard Line steamship, Pullman 
car, Eemington typewriter, Milton's ^* Para- 
dise Eegained, ' ' Longfellow 's * ' Evangeline, ' ' 
Harvard University, Methodist Episcopal 
Church, are the projections of his thought 
and life on the great space and time screen 
which we call nature. It is indeed a gro- 
tesque inversion of reason to seek for man 
in the picture world of space images. Mate- 
rialism, Positivism, Sensationalism, Causal 
Evolutionism have committed this blunder 
with painful frequency, but in so doing the 
light that is in them has become darkness. 
Our conclusion is : if man transcends the lim- 
itations of a spatial world despite his rela- 
tive, his representative, his dependent nature, 
we dare not degrade our reason by denying 
the infinite transcendence of God, the Basal 



Prayer. 269 

Eeality, the World Ground, the Divine Rea- 
son, the Absolute Spirit, our Father, our 
Savior, our Lord. Streams of power is the 
doer of good works, the lover of truth, the 
possessor of moral beauty. But the source 
of the stream is God. Always our being de- 
scends into us from the Infinite Mind and 
Heart. Pensioners we are, not causes. Our 
secret of power is the making of ourselves 
unobstructed channels for the flow of God's 
thought, for the communication of God's 
energy. When He breathes through our in- 
tellect we denominate it genius. When He 
transmits Himself through our will we de- 
nominate it power. When He flows through 
our emotions we call it love. Our perversity 
begins when we withdraw ourselves from the 
path of the divine circuits, when we erect 
our intellects, our wills, our sensibilities into 
self-sufficiencies; when we would be some- 
thing of ourselves. All culture and reform 
cherish as their high intent to let God have 
His way through us; to engage us to obey. 
Condillac would make of the finite person- 
ality a self-sufficiency, inasmuch as he de- 
scried in no prof oundest deep, in no exalted 



270 The Religion of a Person. 

height, the ability of man to go out of him- 
self or to perceive a thought other than his 
own. 

The crude skepticism which the French 
journalist voiced in declaring, ^'The question 
of God lacks in actuality," is the refusal of 
man to obey a will other than his own. But 
as we discover in our thought-activities, in 
our practical activities, in our social activi- 
ties, God is a most vexatious hypothesis, a 
most vexatious fact when we attempt to ex- 
clude Him. He is a most helpful hypothesis, 
a most helpful fact when our attitude toward 
Him is willing and sincere. The Holy Eoman 
Empire, the Spanish Monarchy, the Napo- 
leonic regime of France, and all other de- 
ceased political systems bear witness to the 
vexation of spirit which instantly ensues 
upon an exclusion of God. And multitudes 
of individual souls, far-famed and unknown, 
bear witness to the vexation of spirit which 
ensues upon an exclusion of God. What of 
ethical worth is discoverable in Anglo-Saxon 
civilization bears witness to the royal good 
fortune, to the far-reaching power, to the 
abiding good cheer which instantly ensues 



Prayer. 271 

upon the willing, the loving, the sincere re- 
sponse to God. And multitudes of individual 
souls, far-famed and obscure, bear witness 
to the royal good fortune, to the far-reaching 
power, to the abiding good cheer which in- 
variably ensues upon the willing, the loving, 
the sincere response to God. 

Prayer lays hold of the Divine transcend- 
ence. It thus confounds all philosophy and 
all practice that would find in physical prop- 
erty, in physical energy, or in the finite per- 
sonality the beginning, the perpetuity, and 
the end of all life. 

God pervading all life, God transcending 
all life eviscerates every experience of the 
finite soul of corroding care, and imparts to 
it the saving health of infinite wisdom, of in- 
finite love. God here, God everywhere, God 
solicitous as to the hairs of our head, God 
by His strength setting fast the mountains, 
was the unbroken confidence and conviction 
of apostles and prophets. God in their 
thought was both center and surface of being. 
The only function, they aver, of sun, of moon, 
of stars, of rocks, of rills, of shepherd, of 
sheep, of king, of shield, of fortress, of high 



272 The religion of a Person. 

tower, of lilies, of grasses, is to symbolize the 
beauty and beneficence of God. The doctrine 
of infinite wisdom and will in and through 
the cosmic process combating virtue or eth- 
ical progress, is the doctrine of dualism. It 
gives to God in cosmic nature one mind and 
in social progress a quite different mind. A 
correct interpretation of the divine nature 
repudiates a bi-f old universe. What seems to 
us the antithesis of cosmic nature and ethical 
progress is the meager knowledge which we 
possess of the cosmic plan and process. Co- 
operation, not combat, is God's plan concern- 
ing man and nature. Practical life confirms 
this assumption. Every atom with its attrac- 
tion and repulsion, whether in mountain mass 
or in plastic clay, yields to the intelligent, 
sympathetic touch of man. It is only as we 
measure our individual force rebelliously 
against the cosmic process that we consider 
ourselves the sport of an insuperable destiny. 
God evermore seeks to find in us a conduit 
through which the fullness of His nature, 
whether of gravity or of goodness, of chem- 
ical property or of conscience, may freely 
flow. Our loving acquiescence to His will, 



Prayer. 273 

^^the stoop of our soul before Him," brings 
to our heart and mind a sense of His power 
to do for us exceeding abundantly above all 
that we are able to ask or think, a sense of 
the peace that passeth all understanding, of 
the joy that no man can take from us. 

IV. 

As fellowship, as communion, as petition, 
prayer is man utilizing both for himself and 
others the flowing and the overflowing life 
of God. Entering into intimacy of relation 
with Him, who is All-Good, All-Powerful, 
All-Fair, All-Knowing, sustaining a con- 
scious agreement with His eternal purpose, 
entreating His forbearance, His favor. His 
guidance, we can not but experience for our- 
selves a personal purity, and we can not but 
wield among our fellows a personal power. 
The praying man thus becomes the wisest of 
men, the most efficient of men, the purest of 
men. His league with God and with God's 
world is simply invincible. He is in his Fa- 
ther's house. He is in league with God 
through star and sea, through clod and cloud, 
through moons and men. In heights, in 
18 



274 The Religion of a Person. 

depths, in adversities, in prosperities, in joys, 
in griefs, in thing's gross, in things refined 
he espies the working out of greater conclu- 
sions than the self-sufficient finite wisdom is 
able to conceive. Wherever he goes he dis- 
covers himself escorted by spiritual agents 
and a beneficent purpose lying in wait for 
him, and through him for his fellows. Un- 
certainty of interpretation and of achieve- 
ment may be the experience of the prayerless 
man, but the man of prayer is in accord with 
the cosmic order of life. In him there is the 
knowledge that God is working out His will 
of love, of truth, of righteousness, and that 
he is God's helper. The syllable which he 
shapes upon his lips, without regard for time 
or place, is, God. He beholds the will of his 
Father ever executing itself, either in tender- 
ness or in severity. And both executions he 
discerns as uniformly wise. He repeats the 
believing word of Paul: ^*We know that all 
things work together for good to them that 
love God;'' ** Though our outward man per- 
ish, yet the inward man is renewed day by 
day;'' '^For our light affliction, which is but 
for a moment, worketh for us a far more ex- 



Prayer. 275 

ceeding and eternal weight of glory;" **God 
worketh in us both to will and to do of His 
good pleasure." He is conscious of the pres- 
eoQce, the power, the omnipresence, the omni- 
power of God. Through every individual 
thing and thought he is sensible of a work- 
ing, moral order. All life arranges itself in 
accord with love, with truth, with goodness 
as truly as the magnet arranges itself with 
the pole. Thus the praying man becomes the 
medium of the highest influence. He stands 
united with God. Through his thought, 
through his will, through his emotion God 
animates all men and all things. The history 
of the Christian Church finds its genesis and 
its perpetuity in prayer. Jesus taught as has 
no other teacher the immanence and tran- 
scendence of God. Among a multiplicity of 
declarations we select these: **The hour 
Cometh and now is when the true worshipers 
shall worship the Father in spirit and in 
truth: for the Father seeketh such to wor- 
ship Him ; " * ^ God is a Spirit : and they that 
worship Him must worship Him in spirit 
and in truth;" **Believest thou not that I 
am in the Father and the Father in Me? 



276 The Religion of a Person. 

the words that I speak unto you I speak not 
of Myself; but the Father, that dwelleth in 
Me, He doeth the works;'' **The Father 
loveth the Son and sheweth Him all things 
that Himself doeth; and He will shew Him 
greater works than these;" '^ Touch Me not; 
for I am not yet ascended to My Father: but 
go to My brethren, say unto them, I ascend 
unto My Father and your Father; and to 
My God and your God." And possessing a 
knowlege of His Father's presence and power 
exceeding that of all prophets, of all apostles, 
of all philosophers, of all poets, Jesus prayed 
with an intensity so poignant that, according 
to evangelic record, *^His sweat was as it 
were great drops of blood falling down to the 
ground." Christian leaders of extraordi- 
nary individual and social efficiency have 
been men of intense prayerfulness. They 
esteemed tremendously the personal charac- 
ter of God's world. They admitted under 
no circumstance the self-sufficiency of the 
physical universe or of the finite personality. 
Nature they did not erect into a system of 
independence with which God had to reckon. 
They saw in the sense-world a mere world 



Prayer. 277 

of symbols. They made use of all things ma- 
terial, as subalterns, obedient always to the 
will of the Spirit. It is a fact of history ab- 
solutely beyond controversy that the man of 
conscious fellowship with God, of unremit- 
ting sense of dependence on God, has been 
above all others the agent and the playfellow 
of the original and ever-operative laws of 
the world. History-makers whose work is at 
one with the eternities, like unto the Apostle 
Paul, the Evangelists John, Matthew, Luke, 
Mark, James, Simon Peter, of Augustine, 
Chrysostom, John Wickliffe, William the Si- 
lent, Martin Luther, John Wesley, William 
E. Gladstone, Michael Angelo, John G. Whit- 
tier, Eobert Morrison, Lord Kelvin, were 
men in whose brain and conscience lodged the 
overpowering sense of God infilling and God 
transcending all finite life. They were con- 
vinced that all rectitude, regardless of imme- 
diate circumstantial result, was a perpetual 
victory. They did not fly to the events of 
the hour for the confirmation of personal 
worth and effectiveness. Their agreement 
with the mind of God gave to them the vision 
of causes. And all vision of causes is the 



278 The Religion of a Person. 

utter obliteration of time and space limits. 
The reply of Adoniram Judson to the query 
of a skeptical inquirer as to the prospect of 
the conversion of Burma, *^As bright as the 
promises of God," luminously exhibits the 
confidence and the vision of the man of 
prayer. What we characterize as heroism is 
but slag and refuse if it is not rooted in the 
will of God. The Moslem soldier is insanely 
courageous in his attacks upon all dissenters 
from the faith of Mohammed. The French 
soldiery under the leadership of Napoleon the 
First knew not the word retreat. Alex- 
ander the Great regarded not Asiatic deserts, 
Himalayan mountain ranges, inter-continen- 
tal seas in his military subjugation of the 
world. Hernando Cortez in the early years 
of the sixteenth century pierced the wilds of 
the American continent in his eager search 
for gold, that he might satisfy the heart- 
hunger of his Spanish sovereign. Surface 
observers have found in these characters and 
in similar characters heroic traits. In them 
they have found a wild courage, a stoicism not 
of the regulation order, a tart cathartic qual- 
ity which have been confounded with heroism. 



Prayer. 279 

The introduction of a tliorongli criticism, 
however, discovers in the Moslem fanatic, in 
the French soldier, in Alexander, in Cortez, 
and in all characters like unto them, a domi- 
nant sensuonsness, not a sovereign spiritn- 
ality. Displays of daring like nnto these are 
to be classed with disease and deformity. 
Thev are infractions of moral law, of mental 
law, of physical law. Their nature is a fe- 
rocity finding its physical parallel in a hydro- 
phobia that would bark at one's wife and 
babes, in an insanity that would make one 
eat grass. Compounds of human vice and 
crime such as these find in their wildness an 
outlet for their nature. The sigTiificance of 
life they do not possess. They do not in- 
terpret it in the terms of the spirit, but in 
terms of the flesh. In reality they do not 
build, but destroy, the social fabric. They 
are essentially anarchistic. And this is true 
of every votary of the impersonal, of the 
materialistic, of the sensuous. The only 
heroism that abides and effects a permanent 
weal among men is the heroism that finds its 
genesis and its perpetuation in the wisdom 
and will of God. Moral cowardice finds its 



280 The Religion of a Person. 

genesis and perpetuation in the repudiation 
of the wisdom and will of God. David Hume, 
the astute champion of impersonalism, the 
pronounced antagonist of all forms of Chris- 
tian faith and practice, gave fitting voice to 
the craven spirit of sensuous thinkers and 
doers when he wrote: *^I am affrighted and 
confounded by the forlorn solitude in which 
I am placed by my philosophy. When I look 
abroad I foresee on every side dispute, con- 
tradiction, calumny, and anger. When I turn 
my eye inward I find nothing but doubt and 
ignorance. All the world conspires to oppose 
and contradict me, though such is my weak- 
ness that I feel all my opinions loosen and 
fall of themselves when unsupported by the 
approbation of others. Every step I take 
is with hesitation, and every new reflection 
makes me dread an error and absurdity in 
my reasoning. ' ' Such fright, such confusion, 
such forlomness, such solitude, such doubt, 
such ignorance, such hesitation, such weak- 
ness as Hume admits are the progeny of that 
thought which sees in God an unnecessary 
hypothesis or a subordinate factor. It is an 
enheartenment to contrast with all imper- 



Prayer. 281 

sonal philosophy the utterances of a personal 
philosophy; to contrast with skepticism the 
affirmations of the Christian faith. The 
thinker and doer who makes personality fun- 
damental sees no priority in fear, in confu- 
sion, in solitude, in doubt, in ignorance. No 
midnight specter is seen and nothing of dread 
is discoverable in the avowals, * ^ The Lord is 
my Light and my Salvation; whom shall I 
f ear r ' * ^ The Lord is the Strength of my life ; 
of whom shall I be afraid?" **I am not 
ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the 
power of God unto salvation to every one 
that believeth;'' *^ Behold what manner of 
love the Father hath bestowed upon us that 
we should be called the Sons of God!" **And 
this is the conj&dence that we have in Him, 
that if we ask anything according to His will, 
He heareth us;" *^And this is the record 
that God hath given to us eternal life, and 
this life is in His Son: Whatsoever is bom 
of God overcometh the world, and this is the 
victory that overcometh the world, even our 
faith." 

Christian literature adds its song of tri- 
umph to the praise-psean of prophet and 



282 The Religion of a Person. 

apostle. This is the voice of Lord Tennyson 
in his *^In Memoriam : ' ' 

"Thine are these orbs of light and shade; 
Thou madest Life in man and brute ; 
Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot 
Is on the skull which Thou hast made. 

"Thou wilt not leave us in the dust; 

Thou madest man, he knows not why, 
He thinks he was not made to die ; 
And Thou hast made him: Thou art just." 

And these lines voice the soul-melody of Eob- 
ert Browning; 

"I but open my eyes, and perfection no more and 

no less 
In the kind I imagined full fronts me, and God 

is seen God 
In the star, in the stone, in the flesh, in the soul 

and the clod. 
And thus looking within and around me I ever 

renew 
With that stoop of the soul which in bending up- 
raises it too. 
The submission of man's nothing perfect to 

God's all complete, 
As by each new obeisance in spirit, I climb to 

His feet." 



Prayer. 283 

y. 

A positive pMlosopliy, an invincible con- 
fidence, a passionate devotion is that of the 
prayerful man. His achievement, his hero- 
ism, is not a convnlsive exertion. He does 
not await extraordinary demands. He has 
no consuming appetite for signs and wonders. 
He does not place a primary value on the 
thaumaturgic art. He is unremitting in his 
endeavor. He hears the call of God in each 
successive experience of life. He sees the 
miraculous in the commonplace, the extraor- 
dinary in the ordinary. He rapturously be- 
holds the presence of God now and here. He 
is conscious of His wonder-working power 
in the geometry of a snowflake as truly as 
in the upheaval of continents or seas. He 
discerns with distinctness the Divine Al- 
migh tines s in the beautiful and beneficent 
unfolding of a youthful soul as truly as in 
the marvelous transformation of a New York 
Tenderloin frequenter into a preacher of the 
Everlasting Gospel. He is sensible of all life 
as a crisis. No day or hour admits a meager 
evaluation. His slogan is: *^ Behold, now is 
the accepted time ; behold, now is the day of 



284 The Religion of a Person. 

salvation !'' This day, tMs hour is to him 
a perpetual morning. In each individual 
period of life he is conscious of a great range 
of affinities. In the ministry of William But- 
ler in India, of Bishop Hannington in Africa, 
he discovers a ready combination with the so- 
cial reforms wrought by Sir Ashley Cooper 
in England and Clara Barton in America. 
He carries all time, all space in his eye, in 
his heart, in his mind. Lines of cleavage be- 
tween the supernatural and the natural, be- 
tween the secular and the sacred found no 
congenial abode in the thought of prophet, 
of apostle, or of Jesus Christ our Lord. God 
now and always, God here and everywhere, 
is their recurring word. Their vision of the 
Divine Mind, of the Divine Will, of the Di- 
vine Heart may be expressed in musical 
measure by Whittier's lines: 

" For still the new transcends the old. 
In signs and wonders manifold; 
We need but open eye and ear. 
To see God's mysteries always here. 

" Through the harsh noises of our day 
A low sweet prelude finds its way; 
Through clouds of doubt and creeds of fear, 
A light is breaking calm and clear. 



Prayer. 285 

" Henceforth my heart shall sigh no more 
For olden times and holier shore; 
God's love and blessing, then and there. 
Are now and here and everywhere." 

Hamilton Wright Mabie spoke words of 
truth and soberness when he said, ^^ Perhaps 
the bitterest experience in the life of the 
Teacher of Galilee was the eagerness with 
which the crowds looked for miracles, the 
apathy with which they listened to truth/* 
And Amiel spoke with exceeding illumination 
in the avowal, *^It is the historical task of 
Christianity to assume with every succeeding 
age a fresh metamorphosis, and to be forever 
spiritualizing, more and more her under- 
standing of Christ." 

VI. 

The exhortation of Jesus, *' Watch ye, 
therefore, and pray always;" the animating 
words of Paul, **I will that men pray every- 
where, lifting up holy hands without wrath 
or doubting;" *' Praying always with all 
prayer and supplication in the Spirit;" 
* ^ Pray without ceasing, ' ' are rooted in a per- 
sonal philosophy. They are the affirmations 



286 The Religion of a Person. 

tliat all life is surcliarged witli God ; tliat tlie 
divine efficiency is everywhere evident; tliat 
impersonal efficiency is pure fiction; that all 
life normally and effectively expressed is 
prayer, agreement with God, perennial inter- 
course with Him, unceasing submission to 
His All-Knowledge, to His All-Power, to His 
All-Love. 

In the natural, secular, order of life as 
ordinarily designated, the man of prayer is 
strenuous in his search for the supremacy 
of law. But upon discovering whatever laws 
are operative he does not thereby banish God. 
He affirms God with an increased enthusiasm, 
inasmuch as law, whether physical, mental, 
or moral, is nothing more or less than the de- 
scriptive order of personal efficiency. It is 
God's way of doing things. And for this dis- 
covery all men should be profoundly grateful. 
Thus the doctrine of the undivineness of the 
natural, secular, order of life finds no cham- 
pion in the prayerful man. A personal 
world, an immanent, transcendent God allows 
no place for a supernatural, sacred world as 
opposed to a natural, secular world. God 
manifesting Himself in time, God manifest- 



Prayer. 287 

ing Himself from everlasting to everlasting, 
God feeding the fowls of the air, God clothing 
the grass of the field which to-day is and to- 
morrow is cast into the oven, God blotting out 
our transgressions, God clothing us with im- 
mortality — does not alter His nature in the 
performance of these markedly differentiated 
works. A grievous blunder is committed by 
us when we assign these works to opposing 
rather than to mutually inclusive worlds. 
Prayer is an emphasis on the Divine integrity. 
It does not descry one God in nature and 
another God in grace. It does not announce 
the ascendency of law in the ordinary on- 
goings of men and things, and the absence 
of law in the extraordinary experiences of 
men and things. It does descry and it does 
announce: **He is before all things, and by 
Him all things consist;" **In Him we live 
and move and have our being ; ' ' * ' The living 
God giveth us richly all things to enjoy." 

VII. 

What of the efficiency of prayer? This 
query is ever recurring. The impersonal 
thinker, the sensual votary, the evildoer find 



288 The Religion of a Person. 

no efficiency in it whatsover. They have 
made no candid test as to its efficiency, and 
because of this failure they are worthy of no 
serious hearing. 

Many devout believers and workers of 
good, affirm prayer to be subjectively helpful 
but without objective result. Other Chris- 
tian believers and doers of unquestioned de- 
votion declare that prayer is not only sub- 
jectively efficient, but is also invariably 
effectual objectively, within even the limita- 
tions of immediate time. Both of these con- 
ceptions are partial. The first would make 
of life a detachment. The universe of being 
it does not appreciate as a unit. The second 
would make personality, thinking, feeling, 
willing, subordinate to the day that now is. 
The philosophy of personalism, however, 
which is in reality the utterance of the Chris- 
tian faith, declares God's world to be the 
expression of His Mind, His Will, His Heart. 
As such, all prayer having as its end the 
promotion of the whole will of God through- 
out the earth is efficient. As a personal world 
the evangelistic word finds application: 
**And this is the confidence that we have in 



Prayer. 289 

Him, that if we ask anytliing according to 
His will, He heareth us ; and if we know that 
He hear us, whatsoever we ask, we know that 
we have the petitions that we desired of 
Him." If the world is God's world, then the 
inefPectiveness of our prayer within the lim- 
itations of the immediate present does not in 
slightest measure invalidate its efficiency. 
The limitations of time do not exist in God's 
thought, in His activity. It is a material in- 
terpretation of life that would bind person- 
ality to Egyptian years, Greek Olympiads, 
Eoman calendars. Time has no meaning only 
as a principle underlying our' Imental ex- 
pression. Personality is timeless. Phenom- 
ena alone are within time enclosures. The 
thinking man thinks with Aristotle to-day as 
really as he would have done in Athens 335 
B. C. The achieving man to-day participates 
in the will of Lord Olive as truly as he would 
have done in Calcutta 1765 A. D. The feel- 
ing man responds as keenly to-day to the 
surging emotions of King David as he would 
have done 1065 B. 0. under the sapphire blue 
of an Oriental sky. The Infinite Personality, 
therefore, reckons a thousand years when it 

19 



290 The Religion of a Person. 

is past as yesterday and as a watch in tlie 
niglit. As to the subjective efficiency of 
prayer to the exclusion of the objective, the 
answer may be made ; if the world is a per- 
sonal world, rather than a self-sufficient im- 
personal world, then every individual soul 
that realizes a benefit through the medium of 
prayer, in its own enlargement enlarges 
others. 

God Himself, as Immanuel Kant incontro- 
vertibly affirmed, is the bond of connection 
between each individual soul and all souls. 
As to the objective efficiency of prayer within 
the limitations of an hour, a day, a week, a 
month, a year, the answer may be made in 
the words of Jesus, **It is not for you to 
know the times or the seasons which the Fa- 
ther hath put in His own power." Of this 
we may rest assured: If all good is accom- 
plished by an immediate answer to our 
prayer, God can not do otherwise than give 
to us our heart's desire. If universal good 
is not accomplished by an immediate granting 
of our petition, then the truly believing soul 
is more than willing to commit to God the 
day and the hour of fulfillment. 



Prayer. 291 

The prophets and apostles, the saints and 
martyrs, indeed Jesus Christ our Lord, while 
intense in their prayerfulness, did not always 
find the burden of their prayers removed 
within the compass of their life period. Of 
the Kingdom that should be from sea to sea, 
of the brotherhood of the human race, of the 
publication and acceptance of the truth of 
the gospel everywhither, of the law of sacri- 
fice supplanting the law of selfishness, neither 
prophet, apostle, saint, martyr, nor our Lord 
Himself beheld the full realization. But were 
their prayers unanswered? In largest part 
they were unanswered in circumstance. In 
cause, however, they were answered on the 
instant. 

God in His own wisdom chose to employ 
the centuries and the millennia for the circum- 
stantial reply to their petitions. The burden 
of Isaiah's heart, of Jeremiah's heart, of 
Jesus' heart, of PauPs heart, for the estab- 
lishment of the earth in righteousness and 
true holiness is finding an answer to-day be- 
fore our eyes which would have made them 
shout for joy. And the generations that fol- 
low shall behold in ever-increasing measure 



292 The Religion of a Person. 

God's loving Yes to their heavily weighted 
hearts. God's answer of No to their prayers 
within the compass of their life-period did 
not embitter their aspiring and achieving na- 
tures. They had no word of disbelief be- 
cause of the non-fulfillment of their passion- 
ate pleas, the non-realization of their highest 
intents. They possessed that ^' stoop of the 
soul," that '^submission of man's nothing 
perfect to God's all complete" which enabled 
them to exclaim in the midst of their soul- 
agony, ''Nevertheless not my will, but Thine 
be done." Soul-striving is not inconsistent 
with soul-submission. Passionate petition is 
not inconsistent with filial obedience. Master 
spirits in days prophetic, in days apostolic, 
in days recent, hesitated not in their ap- 
proaches to the throne of grace with petitions 
urgent and powerful. If denied the imme- 
diate blessing which they craved, they have 
perfected their masterfulness in the eyes of 
God and man by a loyalty to God's superior 
wisdom and will, being fully persuaded that 
what He had promised He would in His own 
way perform. The vision of Paul in which 
he beheld every knee bowing at the name of 



Prayer. 293 

Jesus and every tongue confessing that Jesus 
Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Fa- 
ther, was when Paul laid down his life a 
vision, and hut little more. But in God Paul 
saw the beginning, the continuity, and the 
ultimate of all power, of all purity, of all 
love, of all light. A personal world means 
an everlasting Yea, an everlasting Amen 
to all righteous endeavor, to all sincere peti- 
tion, to all loving agreement. Prayer in the 
final avowal is life lived with a supreme con- 
fidence that God is and that He is a rewarder 
of all who diligently seek Him. 

With Browning's **Abt Vogler," we can 
not do other than say: 

Therefore, to whom turn I but to Thee, the ineffable 

Name? 
Builder and Maker, Thou of houses not made 

with haads! 
What have fear of change from Thee who art ever 

the same? 
Doubt that Thy power can fill the heart that Thy 

power expands? 
There shall never be one lost good! Whait was, 

shall live as before ; 



294 THE Religion of a Person. 

On the earth the broken ares ; in the heaven a per- 
fect round. 
All we have willed, or hoped, or dreamed of good 
shall exist ; 
Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty nor good 
nor power 
Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for 
the melodist, 
When eternity aiSrms the conceptions of an hour. 
The high that proved too high, the heroic for 
earth too hard. 
The passion that left the ground to lose itself in 
the sky, 
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the 
bard ; 
Enough that He heard it once : we shall hear it by 
and by. 



Chapter IX. 
LOVE. 



Who seeks for heaven alone to save his soul. 
May keep the path, but will not reach the goal; 
While he who walks in love may wander far. 
Yet God will bring him where the blessed are. 

—HENRY VAN DYKE. 

What is Love and why is it the chief good but 
because it is an overpowering enthusiasm? Never 
self-possessed or prudent, it is all abandonment. He 
who loves is wise and is becoming wiser. 

—RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 



LOVE. 
I. 

Life resists all hard and fast definition. 
To attempt such is a process of self-stulti- 
fication. Bounds to personality are wholly 
fictitious. We are the incarnation of particu- 
lars. We are the incarnation of universals. 
Weaponed in faculty, we are for the catholic 
and the partial. All things may be affirmed 
of our manifold life, and all things may be 
denied. 

We are participators in the divine ; we are 
capable of the diabolic. We have the thews 
of an Achilles, we are as inert as jejune 
babes. We stretch in our better moments an 
hour to eternity; we degrade in our worser 
moments eternity into an hour. We are 
where we act; we act where we are. We 
overleap space and time ; we are shut in tem- 
porally and spatially as by prison doors. 
We are saints; we are sinners. We are 
sages; we are dullards. We are children of 

297 



298 The Religion of a Person. 

ttie day; we are cMldren of the darkness. 
We are God's helpers; we are God's prime 
antagonists. In Solomonic speech, *^As a 
man thinketh in his heart, so is he." Mo- 
mentarily we make of ourselves methods, 
progressive arrangements, selecting princi- 
ples, gathering our likes, repelling our dis- 
likes wherever we go. 

To ourselves we relate our otherness, 
whether under the sapphire blue of an Italian 
sky or amid the irrespirable gases of an East 
End, London tenement. Pyrrhonism in our 
meditative moments does not smite us with 
amazement. In his philosophic inquiry Pyr- 
rho could find no place of mental quietude. 
In whatever speculative path he followed, he 
discovered perplexity and doubt. Hence he 
urged his disciples to find peace of mind by an 
acquiescence in our enforced ignorance and 
the holding of our minds in suspense relative 
to all life. But despite the fact that every 
man and every thing is the middle point 
whereof every law of being may be affirmed 
and denied, life is not fundamentally an un- 
weeded garden possessed only by things 
rank and gross, ^^a walking shadow, a poor 



Love. 299 

player that struts and frets Ms hour upon 
the stage, and then is heard no more, a tale 
told by an idiot full of sound and fury signi- 
fying nothing.'' It is choice, not chaos. It 
is character, not chattel. It is a growth ca- 
pable of infinite enlargement. It is a pos- 
sible soul-grandeur, not a low circumstance. 
That difficult interpretations of thought and 
experience abound can not be gainsaid. But 
that they bulk larger than the dynamic effi- 
ciencies of reason, of conscience, of love, of 
freedom, of culture, and other immanent 
forces of life can not be affirmed. Greater 
wisdom is displayed in our belief in God, the 
Besetting Eeality of all life, the Father of 
mercies, the Divine Reason, the Divine Heart, 
than in the Blind Will of Schopenhauer, the 
Insensate Idea of Hegel, the Sublimated Un- 
conscious of Hartmann, the Unknowable God 
of Herbert Spencer. It is more reasonable 
for us to commit ourselves to the trustworthi- 
ness of our faculties than to be controlled by 
abnormal manifestation, by anomalous expe- 
riences, by passing whimsies. Greater an- 
tagonisms exist both for thought and activity 
if we make of personality the puppet of 



300 The Religion of a Person. 

whirling atoms, the creation of shifting cloud 
banks, the psychic manifestation of matter, 
force, and motion. If Mr. Emerson, the poet 
philosopher, erred, he erred on virtue's side 
when he gave to us the ecstatic word : * ^ Every 
soul is a celestial Venus to every other soul. 
The heart has its sabbaths and jubilees, in 
which the world appears as a hymeneal feast 
and all natural sounds and the circle of sea- 
sons are erotic odes and dances. Love is om- 
nipresent in nature as motive and reward." 
The man of ethical strictures interpreting life 
as it is in the gilded or ungilded centers of 
vice may say that some souls are an infernal 
Diabolus to every other soul, that some hearts 
have bacchanalian or materialistic revelries 
in which the world appears as a giddy dance 
of death, that some natural sounds and cir- 
cling seasons are veritable Siroccos from 
Pluto's underworld, and that lust co-exists 
with love throughout all nature as motive and 
reward. And if it is wholly rational to ap- 
praise life in the light of the gross actual 
alienated from the ideal, the man of ethical 
strictures is wholly right. But if we appraise 
humankind and its practical efficiency in the 



Love. 301 

light of possible soul-grandeurs rather than 
in the light of the frequent low circumstance, 
Mr. Emerson is wholly right. In our sane 
moments we can not by any logical legerde- 
main be brought to an assent to Thomson's 
soulless and sanguinary world in his **City 
of Dreadful Night:'' 

' ' The world rolls round forever like a mill, 
It griads out death and life, and good and ill, 
It has no purpose, heart or mind or will. 

While air of space and Time's full river flow, 
The mill must blindly whirl unresting so. 
It may be wearing out, but who can know? 

Man might know one thing, were his sight less 

dim, 
That it whirls not to suit his petty whim, 
That it is quite indifferent (to him. 

Nay, doth it use him harshly, as he saith ? 

It grinds him some slow years of bitter breath, 

Then grinds him back into eternal death." 

Within the compass of the immediate 
actual, Thomson's blind, purposeless, heart- 
less, mindless, will-less world forever rolling, 
whirling, grinding may find a partial war- 
rant for its being. But within the compass 



302 The Religion of a Person. 

of the potential it is utterly without repute. 
It is a logical and ethical truism that personal 
intelligence, personal will, personal emotion 
find but partial explanation and but partial 
expression within the range of the actual. 
All literature, all science, all government, all 
religion which makes of the Here and Now 
the All is utterly unworthy of authority and 
acceptance. The promises of the soul are 
innumerable in their fulfillments. Charac- 
ters uncontainable, flowing, forelooking like 
unto Adoniram Judson, Florence Nightin- 
gale, John Wesley, Gustavus Adolphus, Sev- 
enth Earl of Shaftesbury, George Washing- 
ton, Frances E. Willard, confirm this avowal. 
Theirs was an ideal benevolence, an ideal con- 
ception which transfigured all actual men and 
things. The Now and Here did not imprison 
them. The painful kingdoms of time and 
place, of meat and drink, wherein dwell care, 
canker, and fear, they metamorphosed into 
kingdoms of righteousness, peace, and joy. 
Through the miracle-working of the ideal 
they invested the possibilities of all men with 
•an immortal hilarity, with a perennial bene- 



Love. 303 

faction, and inspired the singing of the Muses 
everywhither. 

From the multiplicity of interpretations 
of love we cull these: ^'the essence of God/' 
^ ^ life 's fine center, ' * * ^ worker of no ill, ' ' * * the 
synonym of God," ^^ second life growing 
within the soul,'' ^^the fulfilling of the law," 
*^ spirit all compact of fire," ^'God is Love." 
A veritable enchantment of human life is this 
refined and rejuvenating passion. It is the 
true worker of revolutions. It is a divine 
rage, a divine enthusiasm touching all life to 
finest issue, extorting the resources and as- 
pirations of individual and community, and 
effecting a purification of heart and mind 
foreseen and prepared wholly above their 
conscious thought and will. It is life's true 
sovereignty investing all responsive souls 
with an authority exceeding all titular right, 
which alone guarantees social permanence 
and power. The lover is born to victory. In 
Napoleonic phrase, ^^He is victory organ- 
ized." He earns a reward to the senses as 
truly as to his thought. He is the seer beyond 
surfaces. He relies on the law of gravity to 



304 The Religion of a Person. 

place every stone wliere it is clue. He knows 
that the globe on which he stands is faithful 
and will carry him securely through the ce- 
lestial spaces regardless of all anxiety or sub- 
mission. In a word, the lover is God's child, 
God's man, God's helper. His inquiry is: 
** Shall not my heart, which has received so 
much, trust the Power by which it lives'? 
May it not quit other leadings and listen to 
the Soul that has guided it so gently and 
taught it so much, secure that the future will 
be worthy of the pastT' 

11. 

Love is not a hood, but an eye water, a 
coUyrium, a purger of visual impurities, an 
extender of mental and moral range. An in- 
aptness is the Shakesperean word: *^Love is 
blind;" **Love is a smoke made with the fume 
of sighs;" . . . 

**Love is full of unbefitting strains; 
All wanton as a child, skippiQg and vain ; 
Formed by the eye -and therefore like the eye, 
Full of stray shapes, of habits, and of forms, 
Varying in subjects -as the eye doth roll 
To every varied object in his glance." 



Love. 305 

The lover is the seer of visions, the dreamer 
of dreams, the possessor of the spirit of 
prophecy. He pierces every custom and cir- 
cumstance, and makes of himself the cham- 
pion of all truth, of all beauty, of all good- 
ness. This he does at the peril of being des- 
ignated chimerical and fatuous by the man 
of the moment. But the lover is not a mo- 
ment man. He is the man of the centuries, 
of the millennia, of the eternities. He does 
not permit the moments to usurp the hours, 
the hours to usurp the days, the days the 
years. He lives, he moves, he has his being 
in the light of universals. He does not see 
life as a series primarily of differentiated 
particulars, but as an inviolable unit. He is 
not blinded by the parley of the market, the 
controversy of the Congress, the debate of 
the schools, the gossip of the streets. He 
stands for the realization of the common 
good, for the understanding of all life from 
the divine angle of vision, for the integration 
of God in man, of man in God. He is the re- 
mover of all impedimenta that block the way 
of culture, of reform. He is a believer in 
conservatism, but not the lock and bolt sys- 

20 



306 The Religion of a Person. 

tern. His visions, Ms dreams, his proplietic 
spirit, his mental and moral range find va- 
lidity in his open-mindedness, in his throwing 
of himself on the side of weakness, of youth, 
of hope, of expansion. Fourier, the French 
social reformer, had one redeeming feature 
in his otherwise chimerical system. In his 
Utopia he provided a Sacred Band, whose 
duty it was to perform all menial service 
omitted by others. This Sacred Band could 
not have been other than lovers, dreamers of 
dreams, seers of visions. For love sees in 
all service rightfully performed a high-souled 
dignity, a universal efficiency. 

The lover sees in mind and heart the dis- 
placement of physical force. In them he per- 
ceives the real agents of the world, and in 
the efficiency of their functions he discovers 
the accomplishment of the whole will of God. 
Love looks to the Cause, to the Life. It 
proceeds from within outward. It is the true 
science. It espies no ultimate in masses of 
matter, in imponderable forces, in impersonal 
laws. Lovers have never been deifiers of the 
impersonal, of the material. As philanthro- 
pists, as reformers, as humanitarians they 



Love. 307 

have not subscribed to a physiological psy- 
chology. They have not sought to mount by 
successive steps through physical science to 
living souls. They have not assigned the 
high function to matter and attraction of 
producing Cromwell's conscience, Socrates' 
sagacity, Mozart's sonatas. To personality 
they have given premiership, and what of 
matter, of attraction, of repulsion, of forces 
chemical, forces mechanical and otherwise 
are existent and operative are but personal 
data, necessary affirmations of the thinking 
subject, energies of the determining, acting 
self. 

III. 

Lovers are the true nobility of all lands. 
So much love as a man hath, so much life 
hath he. In the sublime st flights and expan- 
sions of the soul love is never surmounted 
nor outgrown. It is the foundation and sum- 
mit of all society. It successively creates all 
forms of worship and of culture. All vota- 
ries of sensuality, of superstition are not life- 
possessors, and therefore not life-givers. 
The emphasis of the heart, the vision of the 



308 The Religion of a Person. 

moral sentiment, the energy of piety find 
place and power in and throngli the lover. 
Love is God and man in felicitous coali- 
tion. Hence the lover is strong by the whole 
strength of nature. He is a seeker of good 
ends. His presence makes all latitudes sub- 
lime and gives reality to the song of the 
stars. The universe is made safe and hab- 
itable by love, and not by science or by power. 
As ** life's fine center," as ^^ spirit all com- 
pact of fire," as **the essence of God," love is 
everywhere efficient. It concentrates and 
diffuses itself in ray of star, in wavelet of 
pool, in petal of flower, in each pure sense 
and thought. It suffers not itself to be baffled 
or balked. It is in conspiracy with matter 
as truly as with mind. It is not the prisoner 
of the yesterday nor of the morrow. Its 
efficiency is a perennial now. Possessors of 
this dynamic of life find auxiliaries in chan- 
nels near and channels remote. Theirs is a 
power to charm, a power to command. 
Through the virtue of love all life is instantly 
ennobled. In the negation of love all life 
is instantly contracted. Love makes all 
things and thoughts alive and significant. 



Love. 309 

Through its genius nature grows conscious. 
Life becomes articulate and creative. Love 
is acquaintance with all excellences in all 
realms. It is the quick apprehension of all 
nobilities of spirit. It is the speedy ascent 
from man to God. It is a making of all finite 
souls the ladder whereon we reach the In- 
finite Soul. It is a rejection of that subter- 
ranean prudence which would repudiate the 
possible man because of the crassitudes of 
the actual man. Love aspires to vast and 
universal aims. It finds no fortune nor fe- 
licity in detachment, in division, in defect, in 
disproportion. It craves a perfect beauti- 
tude, an all-inclusive benefit. It champions 
that high, progressive, idealizing instinct 
which would make impossible a backward 
step from the higher to the lower relations of 
life. Its slogan is, Excelsior ! To every atom 
throughout all nature it would add a new 
value and transmute every web of relation 
into a golden ray. 

'^The lover," writes a New England es- 
sayist, ** makes possible the impossible. He 
is at once the one remedy for all ills, the 
panacea of nature. One day all men will be 



310 The Religion of a Person. 

lovers, and every calamity will be dissolved 
in the universal sunshine." 

An Arabian poet thus phrases the lover; 

*^ Sunshine was be 
In the winter day, 
And in the midsummer, 
Coolness and shade." 

And in his **Two Gentlemen of Verona '* 
Shakespeare writes : 

*'0 gentle Proteus, love 's a mighty lord 
And hath so humbled me, as I confess: 
There is no woe to his correction, 
Nor to hiis service no such joy on earth !*' 

We should cease our concessions to a false 
nobility. Lineage and titles, decorations and 
preferments, wealth and culture do not in 
themselves make rich hearts. And without 
rich hearts all things else are ugly beggars. 
Kings and princes, hierarchs and savants, if 
not lovers, are but passing ceremonies, ab- 
normal eixcrescences, monstrous pericarps, 
developed at the expense of higher functions. 
The Henrys, the Edwards of England, the 
"Williams of Germany, the Napoleons of 
France, the Presidents of America, the popes 



Love. 311 

of Rome, the prelates of Protestantism, the 
sages of all lands, the successors of Croesus 
in all parallels are fables agreed upon, rather 
than psychical facts, only as they incarnate 
and perpetuate love, ^ life's fine center,'' 
*Hhe essence of God." If we of this imme- 
diate hour are not blood-and-bone, heart-and- 
head avowals of love, then are we fops solemn 
or audacious, giutters of an innocent space 
with a poverty- smitten property. 

The destiny of organized nature is ameli- 
oration. The lover, the true nobleman, is the 
achiever of this destiny. His name sug'gests 
joy and emancipation to the heart of men. 
He is wise without emphasis or assertion. 
He beholds in his fellows his counselors. He 
is strong, without an offensive egotism. He 
beholds in his fellows his helpers. As nat- 
ural law lifts Colorado and Pennsylvania 
plateaus into mountain slopes with no greater 
discoverable effort than that employed in the 
floating of cloud banks through the upper air, 
similarly the lover, through his union with 
all destiny, performs all service with equal 
ease and merit. He is the tamer of chaos, 
the multiplier of the germs of love and bene- 



312 The Religion of a Person. 

fit. All opaque being, all secondary cause he 
makes transparent througli his union with 
God, the First Cause. 

IV. 

Love is the inspirer of mental conquest. 
**To know a thing,'' writes Carlyle, ^'that is, 
to know it truly, a man must first love the 
thing, sympathize with it; that is, be virtu- 
ously related to it. If he have not the justice 
to put down his own selfishness, the courage 
to stand by the dangerous true at every turn, 
how shall he know? Nature with her truth 
remains to the bad, to the selfish, and the pu- 
sillanimous forever a sealed book ; what such 
can know of Nature is mean, superficial, 
small, for the uses of the day merely. But 
does not the very fox know something of Na- 
ture? Exactly so; he knows where the geese 
lodge.'' 

The interpretation of God's world is the 
work of sjTupathetic genius, of virtuous en- 
deavor. No fact is more palpable in all his- 
tory than the frustrations of unsympathetic 
thought, of degenerate energy. Our inspi- 
rations must come from the best of life. Our 



Love. 313 

powers must be under the dominance of love, 
the universal faculty. Lowell sang truly: 

**A11 things below, all things above 
Are open to the eyes of Love; 
Of Knowledge, Love is maister-key. " 

The enactment of our holiest passion, of our 
purest insight is the only way into nature. 
The arrest and fixation of volatile and ethe- 
real currents, the diffusion of adamant and 
steel, the absorption of light and electric en- 
ergy is not accomplished through a knowledge 
groveling and pernicious, but through a truth 
that is always holy, through a holiness that 
is always wise. **To understand the Intelli- 
gible,'* said Zoroaster, *^you must bring a 
pure and inquiring eye. You will understand 
it only with the flower of the mind. Things 
divine are not attainable by mortals who un- 
derstand only sensual things." It is the in- 
finite intent that every separate soul should 
translate the world into universal speech. 
This universal speech we denominate art, 
science, commercialism, industry, govern- 
ment, education, religion. In the ordering of 
His world God made all things and thoughts 



314 The Religion of a Person. 

social and intrusive. No adamantine fixed- 
ness intervenes between thought and thing, 
between spheres subjective and spheres so- 
cial. To penetrate and overflow the nature 
of the other is the reciprocal animus of star 
and stone, of sea and sky, of bird and beast, 
of fruit and flower, of gravity and goodness, 
of character and chemistry. Ever they woo 
and court. Their habitats are abodes of lov- 
ers. Isolation makes Neptune and Venus, 
carbon and phosphorus, cardinal grosbeaks 
and vireos, Europeans and Asiatics discon- 
tented and insatiable. They yearn for the 
celebration of hymeneal bonds. Hence John 
and Sebastian Cabot, Sir Francis Drake, 
Christopher Columbus wedded themselves to 
the deep and dark-blue ocean, **the glorious 
mirror where the Almighty's form glasses 
itself in tempests" and new worlds sprang 
into being. Alexander Von Humboldt, Henr}^ 
Thoreau, James Audubon, John Burroughs 
chanted the epithalamium in unison with 
cawing crows and kites, with nightingales 
and wrens, with hermit thrush, with oriole, 
and transformed the feathery denizens of the 



Love. 315 

air into melodious interpreters of liumau 
thought. 

Assimilation is the clivinely ordained or- 
der of all nature. We take up into our 
thought, into our affection the entire genius 
of nature, else it remains to us a creative 
blank. Kant spoke a luminous truth when 
he said, ^'We create our world.'' This cre- 
ation first and last is the work of sympathetic 
thinking, of virtuous relatedness. It is the 
wise use of every constant in the mental 
equation. It is the pure application of the 
principles which regulate our thought-world. 
The loveless mind, the profligate mind holds 
in disregard this wise use, this pure applica- 
tion of thought-principles, this sympathetic 
and virtuous creation. The universe resents 
all sensual approach. It has for us no cup 
of enchantment, no ecstatic word, no dynamic 
efi&ciency if we so approach it. It is by piety, 
by veneration, by chastened love that we 
command and appropriate the worlds within 
and the worlds without. Love is the divine 
impulse which shatters upon the instant the 
thick or thin rind of the finite. Before souls 



316 The Religion of a Person. 

of the virtuous, lovable, sensitive quality of 
Archimedes, Bernard Palissy, Joshua Eeyn- 
olds, Alexander Winchell, Samuel Morse, 
John Hampden, Jerome of Prague finite an- 
tagonisms could not stand. All things and all 
thoughts, all men and all measures yielded to 
the infusion of their subtle powers, to the 
appulses of their pure nature. Upon their 
advent every temple door, whether of fire or 
of feeling, of wind or of word, of conscience 
or of cohesion opened wide. Such souls are 
inlets into and outlets from the depths of 
reason. Finite embodiments they are of God, 
the Supreme "Wisdom, the Supreme Power, 
the Supreme Emotion. They not only write, 
but plow themselves into the world's all- 
comprehensive history. 

The lover is the mind^s champion. He is 
not guided by fickle fashion, nor commanded 
by petty profit. He is the world's true seer, 
and therefore its true sayer. His thought is 
within him and upon him, and it must out. 
It was the lovable nature of Linn^us that 
made to his generation the study of botany 
a surpassing allurement. It was the spiritual 
serenity and high-souledness of Sir Hum- 



Love. 317 

phrey Davy which made of chemistry a per- 
ennial fascination to his century. Wherever 
the Earl of Chatham or Alexander Hamilton 
sat was the head of the world's political 
table. '\Anierever John Wesley or Theodore 
Cuyler appeared the states of human thought 
were altered. These men created new at- 
mospheres, new intentions, and gave being 
then and now to noblest achievement. To 
inferior souls the world is a porphyritic 
hardness. To lovers it is plastic clay await- 
ing their form and seal. The lover is the 
world's eye. Through him is discerned the 
proper and permanent functions of thought 
and activity. All deficiencies in love are 
marked by an unvarying tendency to bar- 
barism, by a prevalence of unspeakable vul- 
garity, by the sinking of the man in the beast. 
Intellect without the saving quality of love is 
as savorless salt. The Greeks of the Golden 
Age, the period of Pericles, were not lovers, 
and therefore did not discern the proper and 
permanent functions of thought and life. In 
the contumely heaped by them upon the ar- 
tisan, the soldier, the slave, and upon all 
womankind was the announcement of their 



318 The Religion of a Person. 

fractional character. In tlie realm of the 
purest passion they were strangers and for- 
eigners. 

Love represents performance in lieu of 
pretension. It avows the majesty of life to 
be in work, not in word. It is the exponent 
of the doctrine of Use. It declares that no 
thing or thought is good only so far as it 
serves. Nature, it affirms, finds its warrant 
only in benefaction. Such an interpretation 
of life gives premiership to spirit. It relaxes 
the despotism of the senses in the phenomenal 
world and shows us nature aloof, nature 
afloat, awaiting the impact of our thought 
and will. In the lover is found the knitting 
and contexture of universal life. He is God's 
organic agent provided and prepared from 
of old and from everlasting. In his eye is 
the faculty of seeing, in his ear the faculty 
of hearing, in his tongue the faculty of re- 
porting. In adversity no less than in pros- 
perity, in gloom no less than in gleam, he 
finds a wealth of material. From rage and 
pain he draws a rental. His failures are the 
preparation of his victories. To him no thing 
is indescribable. To him no thought is alien 



Love. 319 

to expression. He is nature's self-registra- 
tion, and the record is exceedingly alive. He 
is the one man in every community with ade- 
quate powers of description. It is he, and 
he alone, who holds up each object of mono- 
mania in its right relations. His genius of 
interpretation has its genesis in his sym- 
pathy, in his unselfishness, in his purity. The 
lover sees that all speculation and all practice 
must be either mutually helpful or mutually 
destructive. All great action, he cordially 
avers, must issue from spirit. It must be 
surcharged with energies mental and moral. 
All great thought, he likewise avers, must re- 
alize itself in experience, else it is the figment 
of figments. **The measure of action,'' re- 
marks a discerning critic, *4s the sentiment 
from which it proceeds. The greatest action 
may easily be one of the most private circum- 
stances.'' With equal appositeness it may be 
affirmed the worth of all sentiment is measur- 
able in its application to our manifold life. 
Jesus was the world 's greatest Lover. He 
was the world's greatest Thinker. His as- 
sumptions concerning God, concerning man, 
concerning the world as a system of objective 



320 The Religion of a Person. 

experience admit of no theoretical or prac- 
tical refutation. Sncli a claim can not be 
made for the postulates of the greatest of the 
ancients or the modems. Jesus approached 
all being with reverential feet, with holy 
hands, with loving heart. His conception of 
all activity rooted itself in the profoundest 
sentiment. His every sentiment concreted 
itself as organic beneficence. He knew no 
legitimate activity that was of infinitesimal 
remove from thought or feeling. He knew 
no thought or feeling that was alien to legiti- 
mate activity. He approached all life, as 
Carlyle would affirm, lovingly, sympathetic- 
ally, with virtuous kinship. To employ Zoro- 
aster's word. He sought ^*to understand the 
Intelligible with the flower of His mind; He 
brought to it a pure and inquiring eye. ' ' The 
greatest of the Greeks, Plato and Aristotle, 
voiced the reigning philosophy of their age 
when they avowed, ^^All emotion is a disease, 
and should be eradicated;" while Epictetus 
and Seneca, among the most renowned of the 
Stoics, voiced all Stoicism in the dictum, ^*To 
feel pain or griefs for the misfortunes of 



Love. 321 

others is a weakness unworthy of the sage." 
These philosophers made of life a cold in- 
tellectualism, not a complete and cordial per- 
sonality. Their inability to dominate the 
world in which they found themselves is 
known and read of all men. Jesus made of 
His thought a universal sympathy, a cordial 
emotion, and His ability to dominate the 
manifold world is known and read of all men. 
Science, art, literature, industry, government, 
religion do not find in Plato, Aristotle, Epic- 
tetus, Seneca, or other illustrious Greeks and 
Eomans their inaugurator and rejuvenator. 
But their inauguration and perpetuity they 
do discover in the thought and ministry of 
Jesus Christ. Christian civilization is sci- 
ence, art, letters, politics, industry in highest 
efficiency. Jesus has not merely written His 
name into history : He has plowed it literally 
and dynamically everywhither into the ac- 
tivity of brain, of heart, of hand. He is pre- 
eminently the loving Thinker, the thoughtful 
Lover. Thus He differentiates Himself from 
the most notable of all sages and from the 
most sincere of all saints. 
21 



322 The Religion of a Person. 

V. 

Love is the inspiration to all moral con- 
quest. The Kingdom of God finds its sum- 
mum honum in love. Jesns made all law and 
all prophecy to find their consistency in and 
through love. The impertinent formalist 
who sought to palliate his own moral and 
spiritual barrenness by committing Jesus to 
a mere verbalism in the inquiry, ^^ Master, 
which is the great commandment in the lawf 
found himself hoisted by his own petard in 
Jesus' reply, ^'Thou shalt love the Lord thy 
God with all thy heart and with all thy soul 
and with all thy mind;" . . . ^^Thou shalt 
love thy neighbor as thyself. ' ' 

As a luminous word, which would make 
superfluous all controversy as to the rela- 
tion of law and prophecy to these two com- 
mandments, Jesus added, * ' On these two com- 
mandments hang all the law and the proph- 
ets.'' The practical paraphrase of Jesus' 
saying would measurably be : All law and all 
prophecy are abstractions divorced from a 
personal love to God and man; it is per- 
sonal love which makes law and prophecy 
real; it is personal love which gives them 



Love. 323 

fullness of life; it is personal love surcharg- 
ing them which gives them practical efficiency. 
The Christian religion has borne a griev- 
ous burden in the days agone through the 
emphasis which has been put on mere verbal 
manipulation. Inquisitors after the fashion 
of Innocent III, John Calvin, Cotton Mather, 
Leo X, Charles IX have insisted on the pious 
enunciation of words, words, words. Signa- 
tures to creedal statement had a larger place 
in their thought than the incarnation of love 
to God and man. And Protestantism of these 
latter days is not wholly free from word em- 
phasis. The heretic of to-day is, in the 
thought of a great multitude, he who dissents 
from creed, and not he who repudiates the 
spirit and practice of love. Jesus ' character 
and conduct have not yet come to the pleni- 
tude of their power. In these avowals His 
personality and power find large interpreta- 
tion: **The Son of man came not to be min- 
istered unto, but to minister and to give His 
life a ransom for many;'' **I am the Good 
Shepherd ... I lay down My life for the 
sheep;" **If a man love Me, he will keep 
My words; and My Father will love him, 



324 The Religion of a Person. 

and we will come unto Him and make our 
abode with Him;" ^'He that loveth Me not, 
keepeth not My sayings;" *^By this shall all 
men know that ye are My disciples if ye 
have love one to another." The Pauline ap- 
preciation of love is unparagoned in the 
world's literature. It is accepted as a funda- 
mental postulate in all sane ethics. Making 
known in chapter thirteen of his first letter 
to the Corinthian Church his apprehension 
of a living discipleship of Jesus Christ, he 
averred in substance : The function of apos- 
tle, of prophet, of teacher, of miracle-worker, 
of bishop, of deacon, of elder, of interpreter 
of tongues is good, but the more excellent 
function is that of lover. Love, he protests, 
is patience, is kindness, is good will, is hu- 
mility, is faith, is endurance, is optimism, is 
never-failing wisdom. It abides while all 
things else vanish away. It is the child, he 
asserts, who clings to the perishing function 
of apostle, of prophet, of miracle-worker, of 
bishop, of elder, of deacon, of interpreter of 
tongues. It is the man who subordinates 
them. It is the non-reflective mind, he de- 
clares, which emphasizes fictitious value. It 



Love. 325 

is the reflective mind wMcli emphasizes love, 
the moral constant. The conception of this 
apostle to the Gentile world is in strict co- 
incidence with all ethical inquiry, with all 
ethical experience. It is the absence of love 
which debars God from the human heart, 
from the social commonwealth. It is the ab- 
sence of love which chills, like the cutting 
blast of the east wind, every man everywhere. 
It is the presence of love which bathes with 
genial warmth, like a fine ether, the whole 
human family. The sweetnesses of life, life's 
cordial exhilarations, are found in the fine 
inward and outward irradiations of the lov- 
ing heart. And these same fine irradiations 
are the rebuke of all sensuality of soul, of all 
crudeness of conduct. Love, the essence of 
God, does not disclose itself, nor does it make 
itself efficient in cheap sentimentality, in 
moral levity, in the spirit of rashness. It dis- 
closes and makes itself efficient in the total 
worth of the individual man, in the total 
worth of humanity. It is an emotional quack- 
ery which connives at conscious wrongdoing, 
at fractional interpretations of life, at the 
practice of an impersonal philosophy. In 



326 The Religion of a Person. 

God all life, whether sanely or insanely ex- 
pressed, is metaphysically founded; but the 
freedom of finite personality, if perversely 
directed, is the ethical repudiation of God. 
Metaphysically no man can remove himself 
from the Infinite Presence and Power. Eth- 
ically it is within finite ability. The How of 
such a procedure is quite beyond all logical 
determination. Life alone, intensively and 
extensively lived, gives but a partial explana- 
tion. This finite freedom, however, invests 
with transcendent worth all wise living and 
makes unspeakably terrible all unwise living. 
It is freedom, and freedom only, which estab- 
lishes values in the moral and spiritual 
spheres. It is freedom which makes choice, 
and it is choice which makes character. 
Hence love comes to itself, finds its true and 
high function in the total worth of the indi- 
vidual, in the total worth of the social body. 
The fractionist, which is but another term 
for corruptionist, seeking the sensual sweets 
with no regard for the moral fair, descries 
the mermaid's head, but not the dragon's tail. 
He lays the flattering unction to himself that 
he can cut off that which he would have from 



Love. 327 

that which he would not have. Such an essay 
of wit does not suggest itself to him as lunacy 
all compact. Augustine in his ' ' Confessions ' ' 
affirms a true ethical judgment: ''How secret 
art Thou who dwellest in the highest heavens 
in silence, Thou only great God, sprinkling 
with an unwearied providence certain penal 
blindnesses upon such as have unbridled de- 
sires!^' With the emphasis of terror love 
exclaims: ^^The soul that sinneth, it shall 
die;" '^To be carnally minded is death;" 
^'He that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh 
reap corruption;" *^The wages of sin is 
death." With the emphasis of infinite ten- 
derness love exclaims: **He that soweth to 
the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life ever- 
lasting;" ** Blessed are the pure in heart, 
for they shall see God!" *' Blessed are they 
which do hunger and thirst after righteous- 
ness, for they shall be filled!" ^'To be spir- 
itually minded is life and peace." Prophets 
and apostles, philanthropists, and all workers 
of good discern in life a wholeness. Against 
moral and spiritual dissipation they protest. 
They affirm a causal and circumstantial 
benefit to all personal integrity. They affirm 



328 The Religion of a Person. 

a causal and circumstantial bane to all per- 
sonal folly. Jesus in His ministry appealed 
to the whole man. He did not fractionalize 
personality. He sought to evoke all thought, 
all volition, all emotion. He allowed no man 
to become His disciple who would give first 
place in his thought or service to self-indul- 
gence, to self-interest. His unvarying condi- 
tion of discipleship was: **If any man will 
come after Me, let him deny himself, take 
up his cross., and follow Me;" *'If any man 
come to Me and hate (subordinate) not his 
father and mother, and wife and children, 
and brethren and sisters, yea, and his own 
life also, he can not be My disciple." Love 
as incarnated in Jesus Christ is the whole 
giving of one^s self. It is the utter absence 
of detachment, of division. It is the dedica- 
tion of all ingenuity to the furtherance of all 
good. Paul expressed this dedication in his 
Philippian epistle: *^What things were gain 
to me, those I counted loss for Christ. Yea, 
doubtless, and I count all things but loss for 
the excellency of the knowledge of Christ 
Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the 



Love. 329 

loss of all things, and do count but refuse 
that I may win Christ. ^^ 

The Incarnate Christ is for all men a total 
personal worth. Above all characters of his- 
tory He is the completion of life. The apos- 
tolic affirmation, ' ' Ye are complete in Him, ' ' 
is the invincible word of all individual and 
social attainment. He is our exemplar in the 
total devotion of one's power to the will of 
God. He is our exemplar in the total ex- 
penditure of one's self in behalf of whatso- 
ever things are true, honest, just, pure, 
lovely, and of good report. If we would 
really live we must reproduce the mind and 
ministry of the Son of God. Our acceptance 
with God, our rejection by Him, is condi- 
tioned upon our attitude toward life as it is 
revealed in Jesus Christ. Lovers we are if 
we reincarnate Him who '* spoke as never 
man spake," who ^^came not to be ministered 
unto, but to minister," **who went about do- 
ing good." 

Perverters we are of the significance of 
life, corrupters we are of the sources and 
streams of life if we do not reincarnate the 
Only Begotten Son of God. 



330 The Religion of a Person. 

VI. 

^^The moment we indulge our amotions 
the earth is metamorphosed : there is no win- 
ter and no night; all tragedies, all ennuis 
vanish/' writes a wise latter-day lover. It 
is love which bids vulgarity, ignorance, mis- 
apprehension, depression, defects avaunt. 
A new order is established under the domi- 
nance of love. Heart-throbbings hitherto un- 
kaown, soul communications which literally 
relume the world, troops of gentle thoughts 
invested with chosen words, deeds of beauti- 
ful face and enduring figure are the sole cre- 
ations of love. Love conceives magnificently 
of itself. It is conscious of a universal suc- 
cess even though bought by uniform particu- 
lar failures. Compared with love, all other 
forces of life are shadows. It must be the 
soul of faith, of reason, of modesty, of free- 
dom, of prayer, of work, else they are not. 

All thought-process and product is an 
Egyptian skull at life's banquet if love's 
presence and potency is not regnant. 

Love hastens not to short and poor con- 
clusions. Its laws are great, austere, eternal, 
of one web with the thought and purpose 



Love. 331 

of God. It does not approach life with adul- 
terate passion. It hurries not to suck a sud- 
den sweetness. It respects the divine affini- 
ties of virtue. It interprets life as a noble 
depth, a noble height. It has high regard 
for the working of that law which consumes 
a million years in the hardening of a ruby. 
It would not make the mind, the will, the 
heart of God prisoners of Greek Olympiads, 
of Roman calendars. Nor would it imprison 
the possibilities and achievements of human 
personality within the limitations of an Alex- 
andrian empire, a Jewish monarchy, a Teu- 
tonic civilization. It respects the day only 
in the light of the centuries and the millennia. 
It respects the centuries and the millennia 
only in the light of the Eternal Now. Love 
adopts Augustine's expressive figure, *^The 
nature of God is a circle whose center is 
everywhere and whose circumference is no- 
where." It descries all thought and experi- 
ence as an apprenticeship to ever-expanding, 
ever-perpetuating truth. The world is God 's 
world, is love's avowal. As such a world 
there is no end to personal possibility, to per- 
sonal performance. Every end is indeed a 



332 The Religion of a Person. 

new beginning. Upon every mid-noon a new 
dawn arises, and nnder every deep a lower 
deep opens. Love denies the stability and 
the secular nature of things material. It sees 
in them primarily and ultimately a super- 
sensual utility, a supersensual beauty. And 
this vision is the true metamorphosis of life. 
It is thing dominating thought, it is the pres- 
ent dominating the past and the future, it 
is space as a boundary line to moral and spir- 
itual power which awes the man and loosens 
the beast. The lover is the animated protest 
against any particular, any generalization, 
any practice which would degrade the per- 
sonal and exalt the impersonal. 

All persistent folly, all destructive indul- 
gence, all subtle and open antagonisms to- 
ward God and the order of life find their sum- 
mary in a repudiation of love. 

Jesus in His reply to the Jewish legalist 
comprehended all life in love toward God 
and toward our fellows. This comprehension 
found flesh and blood outline in Himself. His 
life was wholly under the dominance of love. 
His throbbings of heart, His soulful commu- 
nications. His troops of gentle thoughts 



Love, 333 

clothed in chosen words, His deeds of beauti- 
ful face, of enduring figure affirmed the cre- 
ative power of love. He conceived magnifi- 
cently of Himself because He loved magnifi- 
cently. He knew no termini in His heart's 
range. Intent upon His Father's will, in- 
tent upon the most magnanimous of service 
toward His brother-men, He perceived a 
universal success to His ministry despite ap- 
parent particular failures. He did not inter- 
pret life as an immediate, poverty-smitten 
conclusion. His life-passion was transcend- 
ently pure. Virtue as a divine affinity, hav- 
ing the profoundest of depths, the most 
exalted of heights. He sacredly respected. 
Within the compass of Greek Olympiads, 
Jewish feasts, Eoman calendars, Alexandrian 
empires, Teutonic civilizations He did not 
confine the efficiency of His Father's wisdom, 
of His Father's will, of His Father's heart. 
With the purity, the exquisite keenness of 
His insight, Jesus could say, above all others, 

'*I know 
How far high failure overleaps th^e^ bounds 
Of low successes." 



334 The Religion of a Person. 

He used the day in its relatedness to all 
days. He saw no fixtures in nature. In His 
eye the universe was fluid and volatile. It 
had nothing of stability nor of secularity in 
it. It was under the rulership of personal 
power. Indeed, it was personal power in 
projection. His miracle-working was ex- 
traordinary evidence to the stupid multitude 
of what God manifest in the flesh could bring 
to pass. This multitude which afflicted Ju- 
dea, Samaria, and Galilee in the centuries 
agone has unfortunately perpetuated itself 
through the centuries succeeding. The low- 
browed intelligence of that day and this, and 
the still lower-browed conscience, exclaim, 
*^ Master, we would see a sign from Thee." 

Personality dominant in the world of mat- 
ter and of physical force Jesus demonstrated 
to the eye of the curious. To the eye of the 
thoughtful, aspiring, serviceable man the 
world of matter and of physical force are the 
phenomena of God, the Infinite Personality, 
and of man, the finite personality, working 
in conjunction with God. Beyond the phe- 
nomenal, seas, stones, winds, sunbeams, 
cities, phonographs, locomotives, books, 



Love. 335 

paintings have no stability, no purpose, in- 
deed, no existence. 

As a miracle-worker Jesus proved to the 
stupid starers that sea and land revolved 
around the axis of His thought; that in His 
hand He tossed creation as a bauble; that 
all material things and energies had no office 
save the embodiment of His uppermost 
thought, the execution of His immediate will. 

No less of astonishment, however, pos- 
sesses the devout soul, that a man should 
hear with ears as without ears, that he 
should feel with fingers as without fingers, 
that he should smell with a nose as without 
a nose. Emerson in his essay, *^New Eng- 
land Eeformers," wisely observes: *^It is so 
wonderful to our neurologists that a man can 
see without his eyes that it does not occur 
to them that it is just as wonderful that he 
should see with them. This is ever the differ- 
ence between the wise and the unwise: the 
latter wonders at what is unusual, the wise 
man wonders at the usual.'' Jesus is to us 
the proof that the lover not only commands 
thought, but likewise things. He is the true 
Conqueror. He alone has the power to inte- 



336 The Religion of a Person. 

grate thought, to integrate feeling, to inte- 
grate will. He is the holder of property to 
which warranty deeds give no title. He is 
the true adjustment of inward and outward 
senses. He is the poet plus the sayer. He 
is the philosopher plus the doer. He is the 
commander who unrolls the map of the world 
and then proceeds to the work of conquest. 

Napoleon spoke an immortal sentence 
when he said, concerning Jesus: **I think I 
understand somewhat of human nature, and 
I say to you that Alexander, Caesar, and 
Charlemagne were men and I am a man, but 
not one is like Jesus Christ. He was more 
than a man. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne 
and myself founded great empires ; but upon 
what did the creations of our genius depend? 
Upon force. Jesus alone founded His em- 
pire upon love, and to this very day millions 
would die for Him.'' The inherent dignity 
of manhood was aroused to a self-conscious- 
ness through the character and the conduct 
of the Son of God. 

In Him there was no ebbing of the soul. 
He was perpetual fullness. In the worth of 
finite personality He affirmed potentialities 



Love. 337 

of whicli neither Jew, Greek, nor Eoman re- 
motely dreamed. Tlie rabbis said, ^^A single 
Israelite is of more worth in the sight of God 
than all the nations of the world.'' In the 
mind of the Greek, humanity as a word was 
unknown. All races other than Greek were 
despised as barbarians. Socrates expressed 
the feeling of his countrymen in his thanks- 
giving to the gods that he was a Greek, and 
not a barbarian. To the Eoman all men with- 
out his boundary line were slaves and wholly 
unworthy of freedom. Jesus antagonized 
these social classifications. They had proven 
themselves to be savors of death unto death. 
And He swept them from the thought and 
the practice of men as by the fury of an on- 
rushing flood. No man to-day in our thought 
has a monopoly on the Kingdom of God. No 
man is stigmatized racially in the light of his 
latent nature as a barbarian. The inferior 
peoples of the earth are not regarded as sub- 
jects for exploitation. Brotherhood is our 
conception of life to-day. The backward peo- 
ples of the globe are our brothers laboring 
under a great burden. Our work is to help 
them to better thoughts, to purer feelings, 

22 



338 The Religion of a Person. 

to nobler deeds. And this transformation 
has been wrought through Jesus Christ, the 
Power and Wisdom of God, the Friend who 
loveth at all times, the Brother born for ad- 
versity, the One altogether lovely, God mani- 
fest in the flesh. 



Chapter X. 
EPILOGUE. 



The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us 
(and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the Only 
Begotten of the Father), full of grace and truth. 

—JOHN, THE EVANGELIST. 

Behold Him now where He comes! 

Not the Christ of our subtle creeds. 
But the Light of our hearts, of our homes. 

Of our hopes, our prayers, our needs; 
The Brother of want and blame. 

The Lover of women and men, 
With a love that puts to shame 

All passions of mortal ken. 

—RICHARD WATSON GILDER. 



EPILOGUE. 

I. 

The mental and spiritual acumen of 
Bishop Phillips Brooks commends itself in 
this profoundly wise word : * ^ I believe in God ; 
I believe in God with all my soul, because 
this world is inexplicable without Him and 
explicable with Him ; and it was Jesus Christ 
that showed me that this world demanded 
God and was inexplicable without Him. ' ' In 
and through Jesus Christ have come concep- 
tions of God and of the world which have 
wholly transformed the world's thinking. 
No possible speculative effort could reinstate 
the fundamental postulates of Plato, of Aris- 
totle, of Pythagoras, of Democritus, of Epi- 
curus, of Heraclitus. And a similar futility 
would attend the effort to make the philoso- 
phies of the Nominalists, the Eealists, the 
Sensationalists, the Pantheists, the Materi- 
alists stand and go. As systems of thought 
they are not workable. They admit of no 

341 



342 The Religion of a Person. 

translation in the practical world. They 
leave us invariably in the world of abstrac- 
tion. And as abstractions they cancel them- 
selves. The affirmation of the Apostle Paul, 
^^I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ; 
for it is the power of God imto salvation to 
every one that believeth/' is an invincible af- 
firmation. It is the word of the Kingdom of 
God practically proving itself ; it is the word 
of personal philosophy in every-day realiza- 
tion. 

Jesus Christ is the perfected expression 
of intelligent piety. He is the perfected ex- 
pression of pious intelligence. To Him life 
was a perennial and all-inclusive sanctity. 
His pre-eminent work among men was to es- 
tablish uprightness in all realms of being. 
He drew no line of division between eating 
in the house of Zacchseus the publican and 
preaching His matchless Sermon on the 
Mount. His intent was the same, regardless 
of His diverse endeavors ; namely, the doing 
of His Father's will upon the earth. He 
preached His Sermon on the Mount that He 
might win men to righteousness. He went 
to the home of Zacchaeus and dined with him 



Epilogue. 343 

that He miglit win tliis chief of public plun- 
derers to righteousness. 

Jesus effected in Himself the indissoluble 
union of intellectual power and fathomless 
feeling. He was devoted to truth; He was 
devoted to reality. He respected to the last 
syllable of respect inquiries for truth. He 
was Himself the Light of the world, and He 
asked no man to grope in mental darkness. 
He respected to the uttermost all sane forms 
and sane expressions of government, of sci- 
ence, of art, of industry. He does not at any 
period of His career appear in the role of 
an abstractionist, an iconoclast. He was 
sanity incarnate. As such He is indeed the 
veritable Wisdom and Power of God. 

Christianity invites the most searching 
criticism. It is not the creature of fear. A 
masterful mind was that of Saul of Tarsus. 
His distinctions in the realms of ethics, meta- 
physics, logic, epistemology, theism command 
regard of the highest quality. No critic, 
whether philosophical, historical, political, 
has inveighed against the conclusions of 
the converted Saul with any degree of suc- 
cess. 



344 The Religion of a Person. 

With his mind of utmost daring Paul 
tested vigorously the postulates and impli- 
cations of the Christian faith. He was not 
a blind believer. He sought rootage for his 
mind and heart. He insisted upon straight 
paths for his feet. For the employment of 
his hand he demanded a worthy pursuit. 
Did he find an answer to his queries'? Did 
he find a service worthy of his powers? We 
let him answer: **The gift of God is eternal 
life through Jesus Christ our Lord;" **0 
wretched man that I am! who shall deliver 
me from the body of this death? I thank 
God through Jesus Christ our Lord ; " . . . 
< i There is therefore now no condemnation to 
them which are in Christ Jesus who walk 
not after the flesh, but after the Spirit;" '*I 
am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor 
angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor 
things present, nor things to come, nor height, 
nor depth, nor any other creature shall be 
able to separate us from the love of God 
which is in Christ Jesus our Lord;" *^This 
is a faithful saying and worthy of all ac- 
ceptation that Christ Jesus came into the 
world to save sinners ; of whom I am chief ; ' ' 



Epilogue. 345 

**I know wliom I have believed, and am per- 
suaded that He is able to keep that wbicli 
I have committed unto Him against that 
day;" *^ Christ in yon, the hope of glory; 
whom we preach, warning every man and 
teaching every man in all wisdom; that we 
may present every man perfect in Christ 
Jesns; whereunto I also labor, striving ac- 
cording to His working, which worketh in 
me mightily;" **What things were gain to 
me, those I counted loss for Christ. Yea, 
doubtless, and I count all things but loss for 
the excellency of the knowledge of Christ 
Jesus my Lord ; for whom I have suffered the 
loss of all things, and do count them but re- 
fuse that I may win Christ." 

Saul of Tarsus, unrenewed in spirit, per- 
secuting all who were of the Christian way, 
was indeed in Shakespeare's speech concern- 
ing Shylock: 

'*A stony adversary, an inhuman wretch 
Incapable of pity, void and empty 
From any dram of mercy." 

But Saul of Tarsus renewed in spirit through 
Ms living contact with Jesus Christ, was a 



346 The Religion of a Person. 

'^liigli nature amorous of the good, but 
touched with no ascetic gloom,'' a — 

** Seraphic iaitelleet and force 

To seize and throw the doubts of man; 
Impassioned logic which outran 
The hearer in its fiery course." 

n. 

In the presence of Jesus Christ we can 
not be other than deferential. He commends 
our homage, our love, our service. In His 
presence we uncover our thoughts, our voli- 
tions, our affections. Charles Lamb spoke in- 
controvertibly when he said, ''If Shakespeare 
or Dante or Homer should appear in the com- 
pany of the wise and the good, a sense of the 
proper would demand that the company rise ; 
but if Jesus Christ should appear in such a 
company, a sense of the proper would de- 
mand that they kneel." Christianity invites 
the presentation of all fact, the use of all ex- 
periment. Dogmatic assertions and conclu- 
sions are words idly spent. If Jesus Christ 
can not establish Himself as the completion 
of all sane thought, as the wholeness of all 
rational and moral endeavor, then is His mis- 



Epilogue. 347 

sion among men the imposition of imposi- 
tions. 

The Christian thinker beclouds the Chris- 
tian faith when he insists npon his Master 
being exempt from honest inquiry, from ra- 
tional experiment. For our Lord Himself 
life was potentially, if not actually, good in 
all of its ramifications. He is indeed *^the 
Master Light of all our seeing." He leads 
our thought, our aspirations, our expecta- 
tions captive. The best of the world's think- 
ing, the most far-reaching, the most benefi- 
cent of the world's doing, if traced to their 
true source, ultimate in Jesus Christ. The 
parables of Jesus portraying the Divine Fa- 
therhood smite the world into silence. We 
can conceive of no love comparable in any 
sense whatsoever to the love of God as taught 
by Jesus. As Dr. George A. Gordon writes 
in his *' Ultimate Conceptions of Faith:" 
* * God, as Jesus thought of Him, is a being of 
overwhelming beauty. There is no image 
anywhere for this splendor of the mind of 
Christ. Nothing in the extant intellectual or 
spiritual possessions of mankind can match 
the idea of the God and Father of Jesus 



348 The Religion of a Person. 

Christ. Probably the best of that tliongbt is 
still beyond the deepest and most sympathetic 
study. One can only dream of what it would 
be to entertain Christ's vision of the Infinite. 
. . . Beyond the teaching of Jesus thought 
can not go. A God better than the Father of 
Christ is for man inconceivable.'^ 

Fatherhood, whether in America, in 
Europe, in Asia, in Africa, henceforth finds 
its meaning and its practical being in the ut- 
tered and exemplified revelation which Jesus 
has given to us of the Divine Paternity. The 
word and the work of Jesus in the presenta- 
tion of human brotherhood, the corollary of 
the Divine Fatherhood, have given to all men 
and their interrelationship a significance and 
a possibility that can not achieve anything 
else but the establishment of the Kingdom of 
God, the reign of love, of righteousness, of 
truth upon the face of the earth. Men must 
be brothers to each other, since Jesus has 
demonstrated in Himself the beauty and the 
beneficence of brotherhood. 

The spirit of Cain, of Ishmael, of the 
Greek aristocrat, of the Eoman patrician, of 
the Jewish Pharisee has suffered an eternal 



Epilogue. 349 

outlawry througli Jesus Christ, the Friend 
who loveth at all times, the Brother bom for 
adversity. A diviner interpretation of 
human existence and its interrelationships 
than that taught and embodied in the Son of 
God is unimaginable. These marvelous and 
matchless portrayals of God and man which 
Jesus set forth have through their excess of 
light revealed all moral order outside of 
Christianity to be a veritable chaos, without 
form and void. The only savor of life unto 
life, the only wandering beam of light to be 
found in heathen religions, in heathen phi- 
losophies, are but the most partial embodi- 
ments, the most faint of reflections of the 
truth as it is in Jesus. 

The worth of God for man, of man for 
God, are to be found in the Christian religion, 
and not elsewhere. The pathos of human ex- 
perience is visible in immeasurable depths, in 
endless lengths in the pre-Christian periods 
of Greek and Eoman history, in the individ- 
ual and social life of present-day heathen 
civilizations. The vision and the service that 
mean life for mankind are limited to Chris- 
tendom. The discovery of ourselves, the un- 



350 The Religion of a Person. 

derstanding of ourselves, the efficiency of our- 
selves are seen and appraised only in the lu- 
minous atmosphere of Jesus Christ. To with- 
draw from the highest endeavors of human- 
kind the influence of the gospel would be at 
one stride the coming of the dark, the in- 
dulgence of an unremitting sorrow, the giv- 
ing way to all the pangs and fury of despair. 
It is in America, in Europe, in Asia, and else- 
where in strict proportion to our acceptance 
of the Christian faith that the magnitude, the 
value of the individual soul, of the family, 
of society are realized and rightly esteemed. 
This realization, this estimate, remakes the 
world. It is our personal and collective sal- 
vation. Wherever Jesus Christ finds en- 
trance all human interests flourish. Men see 
the worth and joy of living through Him. 
They lend themselves to the utmost of ac- 
tivity in every sphere of being because of 
His activity. In Him they see life to be 
an action, not an inaction. Jesus the Worker 
sanctified all legitimate effort toward the con- 
quest of life in its manif oldness, in the word : 
<^My Father worketh hitherto, and I work;" 
**I must work the works of Him that sent 



Epilogue. 351 

Me, while it is day; the night cometh, when 
no man can work." 

Thomas Carlyle gave voice in elaborate 
sentence to Jesus' word when he wrote: 
**Work is of a religious nature: work is of 
a brave nature; which it is the aim of all 
religion to be. All work of man is as the 
swimmer's; a waste ocean threatens to de- 
vour him; if he front it not bravely, it will 
keep its word. By incessant wise defiance of 
it, lusty rebuke and buffet of it, behold how 
it loyally supports him, bears him as its con- 
queror along." 

*^It is so," says Goethe, **with all things 
that man imdertakes in this world." 

All philosophy that interprets man as a 
determined rather than a determining crea- 
ture finds its practical otherness in the putre- 
faction of the Eoman Empire, in the san- 
guinary thirst of the French Jacobins, in the 
moribund civilization of Turkey, of China, of 
India. 

Haeckel in his ^^The "Wonders of Life" 
appropriately emphasizes the materialistic, 
necessitated order of life in the gruesome 
assertion: *^A man has an unquestionable 



352 The Religion of a Person. 

right to put an end to his sufferings by death. 
Nay, we have a moral right to kill not only 
ourselves, but other people. We shoot or 
poison a faithful dog who has grown too old 
for comfortable life, and why should we not, 
on the same principles, shoot or poison our 
friends whose sufferings should be ended?'' 
Jesus did not put the life of humanity on the 
basis of mere physical power. He declared 
always the supremacy of the spirit. He al- 
ways declared the subordination of the flesh. 
His appreciation of the body was conditioned 
on its subjection to the spirit. Hence He 
called men to a purity of heart which should 
see God, to a hunger and thirst after right- 
eousness which only God can satisfy, to a 
willing and loving service in behalf of their 
fellow-men. This calling is the highest in- 
volvement of freedom. It is man ascending 
through his power of choice to a participation 
in the Infinite nature; it is man becoming 
through his power of choice the reproduction 
of the Infinite love and helpfulness through- 
out the earth. And this highest of freedom 
He affirmed was found in Himself. *^If the 
Son shall make you free, ye shall be free in- 



Epilogue. 353 

deed," are His words. This claim was not 
a figment. Human slavery, political and so- 
cial, the heavy hand of needless want, cor- 
ruption like a merciless despot enslaving the 
race have disappeared upon the entrance of 
Jesus Christ. He has been the Liberator 
who has in deed and in truth opened the 
prison doors for humankind. These prison 
doors, whether physical, mental, or spiritual, 
could not withstand His mighty grasp. The 
poetic avowal has found verity in the word 
and work of Jesus: 

''Freedom's battle once begun, 
Bequeathed by bleeding sire to son, 
Though baffled oft, is ever won.'' 

• •••«• 

**Then Freedom sternly said: *I shun 
No strife nor pang beneath the sun 
When human rights are staked and won.' " 

A moral order, a spiritual goal, a funda- 
mental essential rightness admit of no con- 
troversy in the light of Jesus Christ. He 
has established through His personality for 
the nineteen centuries past the supremacy 
of an intelligent aggressive conscience. Such 
a conscience is at once the impetus and re- 
23 



354 The Religion of a Person. 

straint of the social body. Humanity is 
girded by such a conscience. Eliminate snch 
a conscience, and all life, in Milton's phrase, 
becomes a scene 

*' Where eldest Night 
And chaos, masters of nature, hold 
Eternal anarchy amidst the noise 
Of endless wars." 

Indeed, all life, whether dynamically ex- 
pressed through work, or conscience, or free- 
dom, or love, or prayer, or humility, or rea- 
son, or faith, found in the Son of God an 
indubitable ultimate. Beyond Him we can 
not go. Thought staggers under the weight 
of His meaning for human life. We can find 
but one word in our contemplation of Him 
that fully voices our soul, and that is the re- 
produced word of the astounded disciple, 
''My Lord and My God.'' 

Jesus is indeed the everlasting heartbeat 
of the Infinite Father for His weak and wan- 
dering children. He is indeed the perennial 
inspiration of all aspiring and achieving 
sons of men. Under His Mastership life be- 
comes an unbroken triumph of the good. 



Epilogue. 355 

Apparent moral defeats are but delays 
that shall accentuate His final victory. The 
purblind doctrine that would set human life 
and the lower economies of being in ceaseless 
opposition, found nothing of consent in Jesus. 
His doctrine was that in man is found the 
culmination of all created being, and that the 
only function of winds and waters, of suns 
and stars, of birds and beasts, of fruits and 
flowers, of fire and frost is to serve man, the 
son of the living God. As God's children we 
are the holders in fee simple of all good 
that now is, and of all that is to be. Great 
is our present in privilege and in power. And 
from a present of infinite worth we pro- 
ceed by easy step to a future of infinite worth. 
Browning's lines sing the soul: 

''In Man's self arise 
August anticipations, symbols, types 
Of a dim splendor ever on before 
In that eternal circle life pursues." 



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